


The Encounter at Wolf Towers

by josephides



Category: Alpha and Omega - Patricia Briggs, Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:00:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26583289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephides/pseuds/josephides
Summary: Werewolves had been ‘public’ since 1767, when the Beast of Gévaudan was captured and taken on tour of Europe for humans to witness its change from monster to man and vice versa. In the years after Jean Chastel, werewolves were hunted to near extinction and those that weren’t fled Europe for the New World, where they could hide in the wide open spaces, temporarily untouched by human-kind.
Relationships: Bran Cornick/Leah Cornick, minor Mercy Thompson/Samuel Cornick
Comments: 20
Kudos: 211





	The Encounter at Wolf Towers

**Author's Note:**

> THAT'S RIGHT. ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.

Leah was surprised into being effusive. Effusive for her. “It’s… lovely.”

It really was. An open plan kitchen with a breakfast bar and a living room space with room for two couches. The windows were large with a view of the city and let in a lot of light. There was a separate double bedroom with built in closet space and a large en-suite bathroom, complete with tub. The place was fully furnished, as well, which Leah hadn’t expected.

Given it had been the place where Isabelle had hooked up with the men her husband didn’t know about, it only, very lightly, smelled of blood and sex. Whoever she had hired to clean the place had done a reasonably good job.

Then again, this _was_ Wolf Towers. Perhaps they had werewolf cleaners?

“I’m so glad you like it,” the agent said, is if the possibility of giving a free apartment to her was something Leah was going to possibly be difficult about.

The lanky brunette held out the keys to Leah. Her hand only shook just a little from anxiety. She was human and she was standing in the most prominent werewolf enclave in the Pacific coast of America. It was only to be expected that she would be uncomfortable. Rumor had it they had a dedicated police department for this building alone. 

Putting her out of her misery, Leah took the keys and smiled. “Thank you.”

The woman took a large step back and bumped into one of the kitchen stools. She jumped and then laughed at herself nervously. “There’s a fob on there that you’ll scan to get into the elevator and the laundry rooms at the end of the hall. Um. Everything is explained in here.”

The nervous woman slid a large, padded black folder onto the kitchen counter with a big ‘W’ printed on the front in gold foil. “This is the welcome package. It explains everything you need to know about W-w-Waterford Towers.” She stumbled over the real name for the building. For as long as it had existed, it had been called Wolf Towers, as the only criteria needed, beyond money, to purchase any of the hundred units was that you had to be a werewolf.

To entertain herself, Leah moved a little into the woman’s personal space. The scent of fear increased, her heart-rate ratcheting up. “Thank you,” Leah said.

Then she picked up the folder and gave the human some breathing room, wandering ‘casually’ over to the couches. They weren’t particularly to her taste, being rather floral and over-padded, but currently Leah had a couple of hundred dollars in her bank account and she wasn’t going to toss free furniture out. “Broadly speaking, is there anything urgent I should know about? Condos have additional charges, right? To the homeowners association or something?”

“Ms Isabelle paid her dues annually so you’re all covered for this first year. You’ll have to cover the following ones. It’s all explained, including a breakdown of how the charges are used. I’ve highlighted which package you’re on.”

Leah flicked through the brochure. Her eyes bulged when she saw how much living here would cost her. She laughed nervously. “My goodness. Guess I’d better get working.”

Or sell the place, she thought, which had been her original intention until she’d walked through the cool marble lobby and seen how the other half lived and discovered in herself a previously unforeseen desire to find herself somewhere permanent to live.

“There’s a profile you need to fill in online to complete the handover. Just your basic details and, um, your employment?”

“I’m an Uber driver,” Leah said, sneering at herself as she said it.

So far she had only worked part time shifts, a stop gap for when she needed money for the somewhat transient lifestyle she led, and what she had earned wouldn’t cover the fees for next year _and_ allow her to eat. She would either have to dramatically increase her workload or find some permanent employment, which usually meant security work.

“Oh! That’s great. Great that you… have a job.”

Leah glanced up. Legitimate jobs for werewolves like Leah were few and far between, as most companies required you to declare yourself a monster. Discrimination was rife and no one was doing anything about it. “Is there anything else?” Leah asked coolly.

“I’ve left you my card in the front pocket.” She swallowed as Leah went to look at this. Apparently her name was Alicia which Leah imagined she had introduced herself as. She had promptly forgotten it, which was par for the course with humans as far as she was concerned. “If you have any questions. I could… give you a tour of the building?”

This last was said as if Alicia was desperately hoping that Leah would say no to this. Leah gave in. She didn’t particularly _enjoy_ nervous humans. It made her feel… hungry. “No, I’m fine. You may go,” she said.

“Great! I mean, great, call me if you need anything.” Alicia was already backing towards the door.

Leah heard it close behind her and she sank back into the couch with relief, scanning through the brochure. From the helpfully highlighted paragraph on the financials page, Isabelle paid the ‘minimum’ – which means Leah didn’t have access to the gym, the swimming pool or the tennis courts. _Tennis courts,_ Leah thought, shaking her head. If she wanted them, she could pay a one-off fee for access. She wondered what a werewolf gym was like. Probably filled with panting werewolf men showing off to one another. She wondered if there were many fights.

She _did_ have access to the parking lot in the basement, which was a relief because currently everything she owned was stored in the car that also served as her workplace. She’d got a temporary ticket for today but it appeared now as if she had a permanent space on one of the three sub-basement floors.

The profile they expected her to fill in seemed important. It was mentioned several times. She scanned the QR code that took her to the webpage and read through the questions. Nothing too bad or invasive. She filled in the details, adding in her WID number. They’d have access to her record now – including her full age, any of the details she could remember about her birth parents and location and, of course, any history of ‘violence’ from the last ten years. Anything prior to that was wiped from her record, or so they said.

Leah’s history was clean. Since she had been emancipated, she had worked hard to keep it that way. Her time with her original pack had been bloody enough.

Leah was an emancipated female werewolf. One of only eighteen in the United States. She belonged to no pack, no Alpha. She could live where she wanted, work where she wanted, _sleep with_ who she wanted and take no orders. A lone wolf, just as many male werewolves had been allowed to be if they choose. The law had been brought in only twenty years previously off the back of a swell of a feminist movement that had hit even the staunchly sexist werewolves. It was a life few women willingly took on but from the moment she had heard of it being discussed at the Werewolf Annual Assembly, then voted on, Leah had been desperate to leave her pack. Her Alpha, in the end, had been glad to be rid of her.

Jumping up, Leah decided to investigate the parking lot first. She could move her few things into the condo and give the car a detail. God knew she needed to get back to work.

*

Work was pretty much all she did for the first few weeks, giving her little time to enjoy her new, permanent address. Even as a werewolf, Leah was still subject to the enforced breaks the company required to maintain its safety record and she could only work a maximum of sixty hours a week.

She got the hang of Seattle’s rhythms soon enough, knowing that things would change throughout the year, and calculated that even if she only worked five or six days a week, she could earn a pretty good salary that would more than cover her new living expenses. Maybe, in a couple of months, she could even afford to replace the couches.

And it was easy, if monotonous, work. Except when she drove assholes, of course.

There were – as there were everywhere – a lot of assholes.

Leah liked to think she didn’t have a temper anymore but what she really meant was she didn’t _act_ on her temper. For the first century of her werewolf life, Leah had been in more fights than she could remember and only some of them had been at her Alpha’s instruction. Being a ‘werewolf bitch’ was hard on the knuckles. _Now_ when she met people she fundamentally disagreed with on every level, she had to clench her teeth and bite her tongue, sometimes literally, to get through the experience. Having a bad review would ruin her.

On those days, she took herself for a run around Lake Union afterwards. Depending on how bad it was, she would either do one loop or two, allowing the repetitive motions of her feet hitting the ground to clear her mind. There were a couple of other werewolves who used the route. Sometimes they crossed paths and they would resolutely ignore one another. She knew there were a few packs in Washington State – with one major pack based in the city. The Alpha naturally owned a few of the condos in the Towers and it had long been suggested that he had been the biggest investor in its construction. 

The rest of the condos were owned by lone wolves like herself and a few were second homes for wolves from other parts of the United States and ‘investors’ from abroad. She knew now that there was a clause in the contract that said that any second homes had to be lived in for a third of the year _by_ the owner, which stopped the place from feeling half-empty. This would have meant that Isabelle would have had to make several trips to keep up appearances, given she had only used her condo as a sex vacation home.

Leah hoped for Leo’s sake that sometimes her sex vacations had included him. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine the dynamic of the relationship that they’d had together. She’d attended their wedding and mating ceremony. She’d thought they’d been mad for each other. She’d been envious, actually, back when she’d been young and naïve enough to imagine a future for herself that included a mate.

How had it happened? she wondered, as she always had done.

Was it just something in Isabelle’s brain that had switched? She hadn’t been much older than Leah but had – apparently – gone mad early. She’d always had an eye for the men, enjoying their attentions freely before she had ‘settled down’ with Leo, but by all accounts that hadn’t lasted.

Was it really the madness of the wolf? Or was it something in Isabelle’s own nature that had become perverse as the years turned? 

Leah couldn’t imagine it, personally. Though she knew in her heart of hearts that a mating had nothing to do with love, nowadays what would be the point of making that kind of commitment without at the very least having an affection for that person? It wasn’t like it had been when she had been changed. Even humans had married for security back then, and love had been a side benefit.

Maybe that made her a romantic now? She would never have considered herself to be one before. She once thought herself a traditionalist. A woman’s place was at her man’s side. A mating before marriage. But there had been no man, no mating, in Leah’s life. And through the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries she had observed the changing attitude to women and womanhood. The world was a different place now and, emancipated as she was, the idea of ceding herself to a werewolf man didn’t sit well with her any more. She would expect a meeting of minds and goals now. Respect for her autonomy. And monogamy.

Her experience had not led her to think that there were werewolf men like that out there.

*

Her first full moon caused Leah a conundrum. Cities like Seattle had ‘rules’ about where and when and how a werewolf could change – and these rules were never more seriously enforced than on full moon. It was illegal to change in public areas, illegal to run in the streets in wolf form and law enforcement were permitted to shoot on sight if they saw a werewolf breaking those rules. And before, during and after full moon, cops carried silver bullets.

The wealthiest city dwelling wolves had silver cages built into a small room of their home. If they couldn’t afford that, they would drive out of the city into one of the state parks where the rules were more flexible, though, again, law enforcement was permitted to shoot to kill if a werewolf was seeing ‘breaking the rules’. 

By all accounts, the Seattle pack had an entire warehouse built to ‘entertain’ the pack at full moon, monitored by their witch. She couldn’t think of anything she would like to do _less_ than run in a maze of tunnels in what was essentially a reinforced brick cave but she admitted the companionship of a pack at full moon was something she did miss. But _outdoors_. 

The basement of Wolf Towers offered an alternative solution. They had a series of what appeared to be ‘luxury’ silver cages for hire. She’d read the brochure that had been posted in her mailbox in the first week. For a fee, she could hire one of these cages for her personal use, to lock herself away on the night of full moon. Her mouth had dropped open as she read – the idea that she, and many others, would be trapped in the basement together seemed so unbelievably archaic, torturous even, that she threw the brochure away in its entirety.

Usually, if Leah was in a city, she would take the drive-out-of-town route. The previous full moon, when she had been getting the lay of the land that was Seattle, deciding if it was a place she might want to stay, she had driven out to Okanogan-Wenatchee and found somewhere to park the car overnight. Whilst it had felt ‘right’ being outdoors, she’d been alert all night, unfamiliar with the location and, despite the immensity of the place, had vulnerably felt like she wasn’t alone. It was probably just a question of finding her feet and becoming more familiar.

As the next full moon approached, Leah fished the brochure back out of the trash can and looked at it once again. It might be nice to know there was a back-up, just in case. There was a number to call if she wanted to ‘see’ one of these cages.

Minutes later, she had an appointment for that afternoon in the break between the blocks of her self-defined shifts. She would be met in the lobby by ‘Selena’ who, from voice alone, Leah identified as a werewolf, which the woman then confirmed by voluntarily identifying herself as a member of the Seattle pack.

Selena was easy to spot. She had been very ‘chatty’ for a werewolf and when Leah came up from the parking lot, there were three people hanging out in the lobby and only one of them was talking to the concierge. She had bright red hair, surely not her real hair color, and was probably the most voluptuous female werewolf Leah had ever seen.

She turned as Leah approached. Her lips were a matching red to her hair. “Leah?” she inquired. She didn’t pause for Leah’s response, instead held out her hand. “I’m Selena. Fantastic to meet you.”

Leah’s hand was shaken, hard. They were a match for dominance and Leah felt that prickling need to flex her muscles, testing just how much of a match they were. She tempered that feeling and even managed a smile. She wasn’t in the pack so there would be no satisfaction gained from fighting Selena. “Good to meet you.”

The responding smile was brisk and professional. “So, let’s get straight to it. Access to the Full Moon suites can be obtained through any of the four main elevators,” Selena said, sashaying back to the elevators. She pressed ‘down’ and whilst they were waiting, gave Leah a look up and down. “How are you enjoying Wolf Towers, yet? Been to any of the mixers?”

“The mixers?”

“There’s a mixer every Friday in the bar. Free glass of champagne, or two if you know Martin.” She winked at Leah. Apparently she knew Martin.

 _There’s a bar?_ Leah thought. Thankfully the elevator arrived. “Ah, no. I work most Friday evenings,” she admitted. The weekend was her most profitable shift – she usually worked Friday and Saturday evenings until early in the morning.

“That’s a shame. It’s a really great way to meet people. Now, to access the suites, you need to place your fob here, just like you would normally do, but then press this button here, twice.” She pointed to a circle that Leah would actually never have thought was a button because it wasn’t raised. Selena demonstrated, swiping her fob and then pressing the button twice in rapid succesion. It lit up, a circle circle. Like the full moon, Leah thought. “And then press it again to confirm.” When she pressed it again, the circle changed color to blue. The elevator car started to descend.

Leah watched the floors tick past, below floors dedicated to the parking lots. When it stopped, she stepped out into a surprisingly luxurious hallway with a deep pile carpet and a water feature. She was so distracted by the water feature that the sense of movement to her right, the closing doors of another elevator, didn’t trigger much interest. 

“Oh my god,” Selena breathed, when the other car start to rise. Leah raised her eyebrows at her, saw her fanning her face, as if overwhelmed. “That was the crazy guy from the penthouse.”

Leah’s ears pricked. The higher you went, the bigger the condos got, culminating in a penthouse that had – according to rumors and illegal drone footage – an entire rooftop garden. She’d seen pictures. It looked like there were trees up there. There was an entire separate elevator for the penthouse. “Crazy?” she asked.

“They say he is the _Beserker_.”

The Beserker was a monster who, rumor had it, took out most of Wales several hundred years ago. So the story went, he was a werewolf created by a witch – his mother, as a matter of fact – who went mad when she ordered him to kill his son. He consumed her, and possibly his son, the story wasn’t clear on that front, and then in his madness destroyed everyone human he came into contact with. Then he disappeared.

“That’s a myth,” Leah scoffed confidently, since no wolf could possibly be that powerful or come back from that level of madness with his mind intact.

Serena shrugged, unbothered by Leah’s cynicism and started off down the hallway, her heels quiet on the deep carpet. “Let’s continue the tour, shall we?”

Leah was taken to what must be the ‘show’ suite since it was immaculate. Serena keyed in a code on the panel by the door and the door opened by sliding to one side. Both of them reeled back at the wave of silver.

“Wow,” Leah said, impressed. “That’s really well reinforced.” She hadn’t felt a thing from outside.

“It’s astonishing, isn’t it?” Serena seemed pleased by Leah’s approbation. “Obviously, with the real suites, the door automatically closes and locks after thirty seconds of opening. There’s another control panel inside at head height which is activated by human eye scan so your wolf can’t accidentally unlock it if you suddenly get moon-struck or something and try to escape. And the room has been designed so that if you’re away from this wall and door, the sense of the silver is more manageable. For most, you basically just feel like taking a nap for a few hours until the call of the moon is less pressing.”

Since Leah couldn’t go inside the room, both because she didn’t particularly want to feel like death during her next shift, or want to be weak in front of Selena, she peered two steps back from the door. The floor was polished concrete and there were low level spotlights in the ceiling. There was a wolf sized dog bed and, Leah tilted her head to the side, a faint sound of bells? “Is that music?”

“Yes.” Serena pulled a face. “Some wolves like that. You can pre-program your own playlist or choose from a variety of different nature noises. Rainfall. Bird call. There’s a white noise setting, too. The only issue is you can’t turn it off once you’re in. It’s pre-set which, personally, drives me absolutely mad.”

Leah guessed she could see the appeal. “Can you hear other wolves?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Leah sighed. She guessed it was functional. She was about to ask if she could get a discount for a ‘trial’ run when Serena suddenly made a noise. “Wait. I forgot about this feature.” She tapped the control panel. “There’s… a games mode. You would not believe how popular this is.”

A whirring noise sounded and suddenly a tennis ball shot across the room. Despite herself, Leah laughed. “Ball games?”

“It fires entirely at random from any of the walls and you have to get the balls and put them in the shoot before the next ball is fired. Now, this you _can_ engage when you’re in your wolf form. No one wants to have tennis balls fired at them once they’ve lost interest. There’s an on-off switch at nose height.”

Leah shook her head, disbelievingly. Wolves were playful, she could admit that, but this was almost dog-like. “Do many people use the ‘suites’?” she asked.

“They can get busy around the bigger moons,” Serena said thoughtfully. “But we usually have one or two going spare, right up to the last minute, so if you’re in an emergency situation you’re covered. Though, you do have to book through the concierge in that case as I’ll be otherwise occupied.” She delivered this with a wink.

Leah launched into negotiating a discount and Serena was more than happy to extend her one provided she signed up to a three-month trial. This would eat into Leah’s savings for her new couch so she said she’d think about it, though with gas and paying for overnight parking it was nearly the same price as driving out of the city.

As they walked back to the elevator, Leah thought about the penthouse guy. “Can you use the suites any time?”

“Oh, yes, the fee you pay isn’t for one night – it’s for the whole month.”

Leah’s eyebrows rose. That was a thought. Sometimes she did get a random itch to change, particularly if she’d had a day of driving assholes around. Normally, if it wasn’t full moon, she changed in her apartment, since there was nothing _technically_ stopping her from doing that. It was only full moon that made werewolves a little crazy, a little less likely to listen to their human selves and more inclined to follow their wolf instincts.

“Here’s my card. Call if you have any questions,” Serena said, as they parted ways in the lobby. She swanned off, the multiple layers of her green skirt rustling, waving at the guy on the concierge’s desk. “See you later, George!”

Leah tucked the card into her back pocket and, break over, pressed the button to call the elevator.

*

The day of full moon went badly wrong. She had planned to finish her shift at five, giving her plenty of time to get out of the city but at three-thirty she picked up a couple who proceeded to have a massive, screaming row in the back of her car. What’s more, the traffic was appalling, typical Friday-afternoon stuff with people desperate to get home for the weekend, tourists and a collision causing chaos.

And then the girl pulled out a flick knife from somewhere and stabbed her boyfriend.

For a moment, Leah didn’t know what had just happened – she had been tuning out the argument, thinking how the full moon always brought out the worst in people and then suddenly she smelled blood and spun around to catch the tail end of the attack. The girl, teeth bared in an inhuman grimace, shoved open the door of Leah’s stationary car and _ran off_ , leaving her boyfriend white-faced with shock and holding onto his side.

“She stabbed me,” he said to Leah.

“She _stabbed_ you,” Leah repeated, equally shocked. She spun around. She didn’t often swear but the situation seemed to require it. “Holy shit, we have to go to a hospital, don’t we? Or should call an ambulance? The cops? What— what do I do?”

She had _not_ been trained for this.

“I’ve got insurance,” the boy whimpered. For he was a boy. Couldn’t have been more than twenty. “It really hurts. She _stabbed_ me.”

“Put pressure on it,” Leah barked, reaching to open up her glove compartment. She had about four-hundred paper napkins from various fast food meals she’d consumed in her car. She grabbed a handful and waved them at him. Then she looked up the nearest hospital on her GPS as the traffic started moving. UW Northwest was, praise the Lord, only a five-minute drive. She took the next exit. “Keep talking to me. How long have you known her for?”

“A couple of months. We met through a friend at work. I’m sorry, I’m bleeding over your car seats.”

“No problem, that’s what insurance is for, right,” Leah said, hands clenched on the steering wheel. The combination of a full moon and the blood was getting to her. He smelled like meat. She glanced at the time. She was in trouble. She didn’t think dumping the kid off at the emergency room at UW was going to be the end of her day. There was no way she was going to be able to get out of the city before moonrise. 

She pulled up at UW and helped him out of her car. He was very pale but she couldn’t smell anything that suggested the little knife had nicked anything important. “I think you’re going to be fine,” she reassured him as they stumbled into the emergency room.

A curly-haired nurse was at their side almost immediately and the kid was helped into a wheelchair. “Who are you?” Leah was asked, after she gave the name he had booked under.

“I’m his Uber driver. He was stabbed in my car,” she said. Then, hurriedly, bloodied palms out, “Not by me! By his girlfriend. Who then… ran off.” To Leah’s own ears, this sounded pathetic.

“Have you called the police?”

“No,” Leah sighed. This was going to suck.

*

It did suck because the nurse _strongly advised_ Leah not to leave until the cops got there because it would be _very suspicious_ , and then said cops took a couple of hours to arrive. Once they were there, they told her to wait whilst they spoke to the kid and only after that was she able to give them a brief run-down of what had happened. Thankfully, both her story and the kid’s lined up – not that she thought it wouldn’t – but then they asked for her full details beyond ‘I’m the Uber driver who drove him here’. As soon as she mentioned her address, the big, bulky cop’s eyebrows shot up.

“Yes, I’m really, totally up for co-operating to the full extent of what is required, but I’m just getting nervous about full moon,” she explained, feeling faintly suicidal. Both of them were carrying silver. She could feel it.

“I’ll need your WID before you can go,” he requested, sternly.

Leah pulled it from her wallet and handed it over. The smaller guy went to call it in, obviously to run her history. She knew it would come back clean but she was still nervous anyway. The human police had a lot of power.

“Do you have a safe place to change, ma’am?” the remaining cop asked in a surprisingly kind tone.

She looked at him anew. Had she met one of the rare law enforcement werewolf sympathizers? she wondered. She had heard they existed, particularly in Seattle which – with Wolf Towers – was something of a werewolf Mecca.

Leah had, as an emergency, already put a call into the concierge at Wolf Towers, booking herself in for the night. “I do. Thank you for asking.”

He smiled. His colleague came back, also smiling. “We appreciate your cooperation, ma’am and understand the circumstances,” he said. “We’ll make a follow-up visit.” He gave her a reference number for the incident, which she would need if she had to claim on insurance.

“This has been a really weird day,” she said, typing the reference into her notes app on her phone.

“I’ve never met an emancipated female werewolf before,” the bigger cop said, again triggering the sense that he was sympathetic and not simply violently opposed to her very existence. Then again, she was a female. Sometimes cops mistakenly believed females were less violent.

In Leah’s case, that was categorically not true.

“I was one of the first,” Leah added, her best winsome smile plastered on her face. Her cheeks were tired from doing it. She put her cell in her back pocket. “I hope he’s okay.”

Then she skedaddled back to her car.

It started to rain as she made her way back to Wolf Towers. She wouldn’t have time to go upstairs and put on some clean clothes but it wasn’t the first, and probably wouldn’t be the last, time she had been covered in blood when she made her Change. As soon as it started to get dark, she felt the pull more strongly than she had done all day. Moonrise was close.

She drove into the parking lot at Wolf Towers with relief, noting that many of the security gates over the windows and doors had been dropped. Concern about the occupants or the obvious target the building made over full moon from anti-werewolf fanatics? she wondered.

Knowing that she needed to keep her heart rate down, Leah locked up her car without urgency, walked quietly and calmly to the elevator. Inside, she swiped her fob, then pressed the moon button twice, waited until it lit up and then pressed it again so it went blue. With relief, she felt the car start to descend.

First hurdle overcome.

She’d been given Suite Number Eight and the instructions as to how to use the control panel had been emailed to her. She scanned these quickly as she walked down the plush corridor, thinking it looked reasonably easy. There was a code, which she entered on the control panel by the door with a big ‘eight’ in gold on the front. The screen greeted her with her name. So far so good.

Leah pressed the button to unlock the door. It slid open, revealing an identical room to the one she had been shown before and the same wave of silver. She ducked inside and saw the matching control panel on the inside wall, with the same screen. There was a countdown to the door closing automatically. On a whim, she selected the ‘games’ button and then hurriedly got away from the poisonous wall.

Serena had been right. It was significantly less unpleasant over by the dog bed and as the door closed and she heard the locks engage, Leah relaxed.

With a ‘pop’, a tennis ball shot over her head, startling her so much she hit the ground. She laughed, her nose against the concrete, glad no one had seen that major embarrassment.

From the right hand wall, a panel popped open, revealing something like a trash shoot in an apartment building she’d once stayed in but about half the size. She peered down into it and saw it funnel down into a pipe. She picked up the tennis ball and dropped it experimentally, watched it disappear. About thirty seconds later, another tennis ball shot out of the wall.

“Okay, now that’s quite fun,” Leah admitted. Then, because it was what she was here for, she started to undress.

*

Leah woke sluggishly, naked, half in the dog bed and half on the cold concrete floor. She reached up to rub her face feeling, as she always did, vaguely sticky and dirty, and nearly hit herself in the eye with a tennis ball, clutched in her fingers.

She sat up and looked towards the shoot, only to find that it was closed. She attempted to open it using her fingernails but it wouldn’t budge.

“Huh,” she told it. She dropped the ball. She had ended up playing the game for hours until she was tired enough to sleep, her wolf brain fully absorbed with trying to predict from whence the next ball would come and Leah’s own innate competitiveness trying to catch the ball before it hit the ground.

It wasn’t the same as going for a good hunt but Leah was encouraged and pleased by how not awful the experience had been. She could do that again, she decided, as she pulled on the clothes from the previous night. They stank of human blood, sweat and fear – not all of it from the boy. Next time she would bring a change of clothes.

The control panel had an ‘unlock’ button now, which she tapped. A screen appeared with a smiley face and an un-smiley face and a ‘rate your experience’. With alacrity, Leah pressed the smiley face.

She then scooped up the tennis ball, intending to drop it off at the concierge’s desk, and walked out into the plush hall. Most of the other doors were still closed and she pressed the button for the elevator.

Leah did a couple of stretches, feeling pretty good about herself, loose and satisfied from a well managed full moon. Then she remembered that probably today she was going to get a call from the cops. Oh, and the back seat from her car needed to be professionally cleaned. That was enough to dampen her enthusiasm for the day.

The elevator arrived and she pressed the button for Concierge and then slumped against the corner. It started to roll upwards and it only belatedly occurred to her that it was taking a long time when the tenth floor ‘pinged’ and a wave of chlorine hit her in the face.

Leah stuck her head out, wondering what had happened, just as a man came _out of nowhere_ and she yelped in surprise, sending the tennis ball flying. He leaned down and picked up the ball. He turned it in his hands.

He was young-looking, but then everyone in Wolf Towers was young-looking – the werewolf curse pinpointing where precisely in your life you would be at your peak physical fitness. For most that was late teens or twenties. For a few women it was in their thirties. Leah had fallen somewhere in the early twenties mark, though she had been Changed around the same time. With the exception of a few more muscles, some loss of sun damage, her physical appearance had not altered much.

In ripped jeans and a sweater, this wolf really might actually have been young, though. He didn’t stink of power or dominance, he just smelled as if he had gone swimming. His hair was mousy, his eyes a muddy brown. He was so utterly average at first glance that she might well have walked past him several times without realizing.

Alarm bells rang in her head. She took a longer, more thorough look. As she watched, his mousy hair became sandy – tousled tones of dark and light brown and gold that fell into his eyes. Eyes which were hazel, not muddy brown. He was taller than she had first thought, taller than her, and he had powerful shoulders and long-fingered, elegant hands.

He made a small, surprised noise as she stared at him. “Yours?” he asked, proffering the tennis ball to her and stepping into the elevator.

“I guess it is now,” Leah said. She took it back from him, carefully avoiding touching his fingers. It was a little damp. Obviously whilst she had been ‘playing’ with it, she had slobbered all over it. How delightful. She stuffed it into her jacket pocket and bumped up her smile, as if she was absolutely fine with being a werewolf that played with tennis balls on full moon. “Thanks.”

He stepped into the car with her. “You’re new to the Towers, aren’t you?” He tilted his head to the side as he pressed the button for the Concierge and swiped his fob. Ah, she saw what she’d forgotten now. “Isabelle’s replacement.” Then his eyes shuttered. “I apologize. She’s dead, isn’t she? Were you close?”

“Apparently more than I realized,” Leah said, lowering her eyes. He might not _feel_ dominant but there was something about him. Few wolves could hide themselves the way he could. That deserved some respect. 

“I liked her. She was… feisty,” he murmured, taking a long time to chose the word.

‘Feisty’ was right. Feisty until she had revealed she was barking mad, Leah thought with regret. She had been truthful with her response to him because there had been no reason not to be. She hadn’t thought she and Isabelle had been close. Isabelle had been part of Leah’s pack for the first thirty years and they had been friends, of a fashion, before Leo had come and they had been mated. Leah had seen her only incidentally after that.

Isabelle had called her, once, when her Alpha had the phone line installed, not long before she had been emancipated. They had laughed a few times about old memories. It had been last time she had spoken to her. 

It probably didn’t behoove her to acknowledge too much closeness to a woman who had, over the last decade or so killed every female in her pack, becoming madly jealous of anyone her mate might interact with. And then flagrantly cheated on her mate with anyone who batted an eye at her. Leo had killed her in the end and then, because they had been mated and it had driven him mad, too, killed himself. The papers had reported it in all its gory detail

Leah had a stray thought – had Isabelle slept with this guy? She’d apparently slept with all of her husband’s pack. With his permission. It stood to reason she might have sought out any available men in the building. He certainly seemed to know of her.

The doors opened on the Concierge floor.

“Have a good day, then,” he said, turning left with a small wave of his hand. She followed, watched him walk across the lobby and press the button to the private elevator and then hold his face to the facial recognition window.

She had just met the crazy guy in the penthouse, she realized. And he was, she thought, quite cute for a crazy person.

*

A couple of days after her first experience of the ‘Full Moon Suite’, she received an email with a request for feedback on her experience as a ‘new customer’. It had arrived when Leah was on a break, eating a Tupperware bowl of pasta she’d prepared the night before in an effort to be more economical, so she filled in the form quickly on her cell phone and submitted it.

She immediately received a call from Serena.

“Look, no pressure whatsoever, but my Alpha’s mate wants to meet you.”

Slightly surprised at the informal tone, and the topic, Leah temporarily stopped eating her lunch. “Er. Why?”

“Curiosity, mostly. You can say no. She’s pretty easy going.”

Never in her life had Leah met an ‘easy going’ Alpha’s mate. Never. Periodically, her old Alpha’s mate got hold of Leah’s new number and she and her coterie of bitches bombarded her with vile messages and phone calls.

“I try not to have anything to do with werewolf packs any more. Makes things cleaner,” Leah replied, exhaling a little. Still, _rejecting_ a friendly advance from a werewolf pack was almost worse, particularly when one was technically living in their territory.

“If it makes a difference, I think it has less to do with you specifically and more to do with the emancipation.”

Leah frowned. Something in that didn’t sound quite truthful. “Why would she want to know about emancipation if she’s mated to an alpha?”

Serena made a noise. “I don’t know. You know how it is. You don’t actually _question_ these requests.”

She did. Oh, yes, she did know exactly how it was. “Will you be in difficulties if I say no?”

There was a small hesitation which said ‘yes’ more than anything else. It was at times like this that Leah was really, _really_ , glad she had left pack life.

“All right. I’ll do it. But only if you’re there.” Not that Leah had hugely warmed to Serena but she wasn’t about to meet a strange werewolf female who was likely to be, if not more dominant, then more hierarchically powerful than Leah. That was a kick in the teeth. At least with Serena she knew they were a reasonable match and the balance would be better. She wouldn’t be the lowest rung of the ladder but instead a potential second.

“Fantastic. I’ll book us into afternoon tea at the Georgian. Does Saturday suit you?” she said briskly.

“Afternoon tea?” Leah repeated.

“She likes the tiny sandwiches. Makes her feel dainty.”

Despite herself, Leah laughed. “Saturday’s fine. I need to be at work for six, though.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll aim for three and hope the interview is over in an hour.”

Leah sincerely hoped if it _was_ an ‘interview’ it would also be over in an hour.

It actually wasn’t as bad as she had imagined. Compared to most werewolf Alpha’s mates Leah had come across, Yulia was comparatively easy-going and, like Serena, pretty no-nonsense. Oh, Leah was sure she could turn on a dime but she wasn’t about to do so publicly in a fancy tea parlor.

Over tiny, _super-tiny_ , sandwiches that Yulia ate with two fingers and one pinky in the air, she interrogated Leah about the emancipation process, starting with why Leah had wanted to be emancipated (freedom), how her Alpha had reacted (poorly) and could she please list the pros and cons of emancipation for her?

Leah did so. It wasn’t the first time she had been asked so she didn’t struggle and part of her felt that in the interest of female werewolf progression she should answer as best as she could.

“What is it you miss the most?” Yulia wanted to know when Leah was done. She had the faintest hint of a Slavic accent, Leah thought, and had a very wholesome aesthetic of rich chestnut hair, curling and wild, with freckles across the bridge of her nose and light brown eyes. She was pretty, but not beautiful which Leah – aware that this was superficial – found pleasing. Leah, having been told so many times in her life, knew she was beautiful. It was simply fact.

“The camaraderie,” she said, easily. “When the pack was good, it was very good. And knowing that you had someone at your back. There’s safety in that. It took me a while to get used to doing things on my own.”

This was received with nods from both women. Serena, dressed in a vivid green dress, her hair now a sharp black, straightened so it fell down her back in a shining waterfall, had mostly been silent through the ‘interview’. She had eaten all of the egg sandwiches and drank several glasses of champagne, whilst Leah had just stuck to endless cups of tea. 

“I have met John Davy a few times,” Yulia said, picking up a pink square of something topped with cream. She popped this into her mouth delicately and chewed, dabbed her lips with her napkin. “He’s a hard man. Hard working and hard, was my impression. And… old fashioned, of course.”

It was a neat summary. She gave Yulia an appraising look. “That’s him.” She waited for any mention of Davy’s mate but, to her relief, nothing was forthcoming.

Yulia nodded, as if pleased. “I have enjoyed this, Leah. You were not what I expected.”

Leah didn’t know what she might have expected. Possibly the idea of an emancipated werewolf female came with some pre-conceptions. Maybe that she was a weird loner? Was the afternoon tea a test to see if she’d become a savage without the ‘civilizing’ influence of a pack? 

“Here,” Yulia proffered her a business card. “These are my numbers. Call if you have need of anything. And, Serena, you should introduce her to a few people.” This last was delivered with a commanding voice.

“Yes, Alpha,” Serena murmured obediently, eyes downcast.

Yulia’s smiled was broad and inclusive. “We have quite a few lone wolves in Seattle, thanks to the Towers. A few celebrities, too. It’s good that everyone knows one another. Creates… camaraderie,” she said, repeating Leah’s word with a real glint in her eye.

*

Leah saw crazy penthouse guy a few more times, in the elevator or in the lobby and mostly when she was going to her shift or returning and he was coming back from swimming or playing tennis or, one Friday evening, clearly leaving the ‘mixer’. It got to the point where, even though they had really only ever exchanged cursory greetings and commonplaces, that she felt comfortable enough to say, “And what man-of-leisure-activity are you returning from?”

They were crossing paths in the lobby. She was carrying take-out, which she had just picked up from the concierge’s desk. He was holding a book. She had no problems ‘seeing’ him as he was now. He was wearing sweats and his hair was slightly damp.

“Ah.” His hazel eyes shifted to her bag of take-out and then back up to her. He didn’t seem to know what to say.

She smelled the chlorine herself and put two and two together, nodded as if had responded. “Swimming and… reading, I guess?” Leah turned her head to the side to read the spine but it wasn’t in English.

“My… it was dropped off for me. Earlier,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling with his smile. “I didn’t take it with me. Do you read?”

“Not if I can help it,” Leah admitted. She didn’t have the attention span for books. Or the time, really.

She felt she had disappointed him, briefly. Then his expression lightened. “You’re a woman of action, I imagine.”

Leah laughed. “It’s a nice way of putting it.”

“I don’t suppose… you’d like to join me? To eat?” he said, his voice almost loud in the quiet lobby.

Astonished, she lifted the bag, her first response leaving her mouth before she really thought about it, “I… didn’t order much.” She’d ordered enough for four humans but for a werewolf that was only just enough. She’d had a discount code, the only reason she had treated herself to takeout, otherwise it would have been ludicrously expensive.

“No, of course. I have food. Waiting for me. I thought – I have a garden. It’s a nice evening.” He shrugged. “It could be companionable.”

Leah’s eyes widened. Any hesitation she might have felt about going into a strange werewolf’s home was erased by the thought of visiting a roof garden she _may_ have extensively Googled. She nodded, hoping it didn’t look as frantic as it felt. “I would love to.”

He smiled and, again, the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Fantastic.” He gestured towards his private elevator.

Helplessly, Leah cast a look at George, manning the concierge’s desk for the evening, and he gave her a little thumbs up. She scurried after her ‘companion’ for the evening. “You know, I don’t actually know your name.” She couldn’t just keep calling him ‘crazy penthouse guy’ in her head.

He pressed the button to call the elevator and held his face against the scanner. “You don’t? Oh, how remiss of me. My name is Bran Cornick. And you’re Leah, aren’t you?”

*

Leah’s mouth dropped open when the doors of the elevator opened into the penthouse. It couldn’t have dropped open _more_ as he walked her through the – well, ‘apartment’ seemed misleading. The penthouse was _two_ floors, with some rooms split over mezzanines, like the living area and the _other_ living area and a sort of kitchen space with a dining table that could seat fourteen that had floor to ceiling windows of the ocean.

Her face hurt from all the staring she was doing.

“Would you mind—?” Bran Cornick held out a couple of plates to her. “If you could take those, I’ll put everything else on a tray.”

Leah nodded quickly and tucked the plates under one arm. “Is there anything else I could carry?” she asked, as he took a crockpot out of the oven and put it on a tray. He added cutlery, water glasses, a basket of rolls and butter, salt and pepper.

“No, no, but if you could press that button over there,” he said, nodding to the door to another small elevator. It had a glass front and probably took two, perhaps three quite svelte people.

She stepped inside and he followed. At his direction she pressed the ‘up’ arrow. She could feel her excitement building.

When the doors opened, he nodded again. “Just over there,” he said and she headed for a wrought iron table and chairs set that was not far from the door, set on a wooden decking.

She put down her take-out bag and helped him set the table for two – glasses and plates and cutlery. Only then did she look up. And gasp.

“Oh my goodness. You could almost believe you aren’t in a city,” she whispered, because it was a space that required whispering.

It was green. Lush, endless green. The vegetation, the trees, the _thicket_.

Above her, Leah could see the canopy of trees and through that, even through the light pollution, the stars. It was unreal. Unexpectedly, she felt her eyes fill with tears and she turned away from him, walking briskly over to study the trunk of a silver birch tree as if it was the most fascinating thing she had ever seen.

“Well, it’s designed to take a helicopter or four, so I reasoned that a few feet of soil wouldn’t to do too much damage. I couldn’t grow an oak up here, of course, and the wind is… sometimes a problem. There’s a net I’ve manufactured…” he said vaguely. He stopped. “You’re crying.”

“I’m not,” Leah denied quickly because tears were a demonstration of weakness and Leah didn’t cry. But of course, she was, and tears were running freely down her face. She wiped her hands across her cheeks. “I don’t know why.”

Bran sighed, sadly. “It reminds you of home.”

She jerked her head around to look at him as the words hit home. “How did you… did you read my mind?”

He was perplexed. “Why do people always think that? No, it’s simply the obvious answer. You’re not sad. You’re… nostalgic.”

She put a hand to her chest. He was right. “I didn’t know I missed it so much.”

Bran beckoned to a chair and she took her seat. “Where is ‘home’?”

“That’s what I mean.” She began to unpack the take-out boxes. “I haven’t, there hasn’t been a ‘home’ for a very long time.”

“Where were you born?”

“Colorado. Or what would become Colorado.”

His face brightened. “You’re not that young, then.”

She shook her head. “I was born in 1763.”

This pleased him. He took the lid off his crockpot with something of a flourish. Mouthwatering aromas of beef and cooked wine and garlic and onion made her own meal pale in comparison. “You don’t meet many werewolves your age any more.”

That was true. The average lifespan, as the newspapers relished pointing out, was around fifteen years and that didn’t include the numbers who failed to make the Change. It was part of the reason she had stopped reading the news. “Do you meet many werewolves at all?” she asked, more curious than anything.

Bran laughed. Conversely, it made him look older, as if true laughter was a rare thing and his face didn’t know how to do it. For the first time, Leah thought that maybe he was more than just ‘cute’. That he might actually be dangerously attractive.

“You make a good point,” he chuckled. “Would you like to try some of my stew?”

*

Later, she realized that she had actually found out very little about Bran. She knew his name and she knew he had two sons – lots of male werewolves did have children, though they didn’t always take the Change – and that he had lived in Wolf Towers since it had been built.

Mostly he asked questions about her. About her human family. About the pack she had lived in most of her life. About her emancipation and what had made her decide to do it. He asked enough pertinent questions that she guessed he already had the bare bones of her profile from somebody. 

“You knew Isabelle from your pack, then,” he confirmed, mopping up the last of his stew with the bread roll.

Leah dabbed her lips with her napkin. “Yes. She was there when I joined. Then she met Leo and.” She stopped, shrugging. “Did you know her?”

“A little. In passing. She was very charming. You wouldn’t have known what was happening.” Bran raised his eyebrows. “I may have been surprised with the variation of her male companionship, however, given she wore wedding rings.”

That was a polite way to put it. She smiled. “She was always very popular, in that sense. I just thought – when she mated –” Leah didn’t want to speak ill of the dead so she stopped herself. She didn’t know what his opinions were on the topic. Some men were old fashioned and she didn’t want to discuss if he was. So far this had been the most civilized interaction with a werewolf man she’d had in years. “I understood they had an agreement.”

“Some do,” he said, eyes drifting to look somewhere over her left shoulder. He had done this a few times, as if he was frequently lost in thought. He hadn’t mentioned a mate but she supposed if he had two sons there might be one. Or have been one – she would have to have been human to give him children.

She wondered – fleetingly – if they looked like him.

At this odd diversion of her thoughts, Leah began to pack up the little cartons of her take-out, tidying them away into the plastic bag. All in all, she had preferred his meal. She really ought to learn to cook for herself but it always seemed so much time and energy when she was only making it for herself. 

Bran seemed to come back to himself. “The other day, with the tennis ball, you smelled like blood. Not your own, I assume?”

“Oh. No. I was driving someone and his girlfriend stabbed him in the back of my car. I had to take him to hospital.”

“Goodness. Human?”

She nodded. “Yes. Though… there was something a little inhuman about the girl.” Leah had thought on this a great deal, reliving the moment when she had turned in her car to see the face of her victim and his assailant. She had seen angry, violently angry, humans before but there was something about her face that had been unsettling.

“Fae?” Bran suggested.

Leah pressed her lips together, shaking her head. “I would have known when she got in the car.”

“Witch, then?”

“Maybe. I can’t always tell that. Particularly if they’re merely witch-born.”

“Merely,” he repeated, his eyebrows, darker than his hair, rising towards his hairline. 

“I mean— if they’re not actively practicing. They’d been having an argument. Perhaps it was simply a crime of passion. I heard from the police that he survived. He sent me flowers, actually.” She hadn’t been able to keep them, of course, because they had been lilies and stunk out her apartment but the sentiment had been appreciated. She’d given them to the concierge desk where they had held pride of place for nearly a whole week.

“A nice gesture.”

“Very nice. And he didn’t bleed too badly on the back seats which meant I didn’t have to claim on my insurance.” Additional bonus.

Bran smiled at her. “You’re very practical. Here, let me take that and throw it out. Would you like some wine? Do you drink wine?”

She nodded. “I like the taste.”

He stood up and instead of heading downstairs as she was expecting, he walked along a path out of sight with her bag of trash and she heard the distinct suction sound of a refrigerator door opening. Curious, she got up and followed him. She laughed. “There’s a kitchen up here too?”

Bran smiled at her sheepishly. “Just a small one.”

“Bigger than mine.” It had three walls, she presumed to protect it from most of the weather, though everything seemed to be well sealed and insulated against the elements. Instead of a stove, there was a grill.

He took two glasses from a cabinet. “Oh, I didn’t ask if you preferred red or white?” he said, pausing in opening a bottle of white.

“I don’t mind.” She liked the refreshing cold of white wine, its sometimes tart taste. She leaned on the stone counter as he poured. “This is nice,” she said to him, because sometimes she said exactly what she thought. “Do you do this often?”

“Eat up here? Yes. Invite people from the building up? Never.”

“Oh. Then it’s especially nice,” she said, blushing and taking the glass he offered her.

They walked back to the table, Bran pointed out some ferns he was particularly pleased with, enunciating their Latin names as if he might, indeed, be able to speak Latin fluently. She was too afraid to ask that. Wolves who could speak Latin tended to be terrifyingly old.

She sipped her wine, instead, and ignored the questions she might have about him. Later, alone in bed, Leah reflected that it was probably the best evening she’d had in decades.

*

A week later, she came home to find a plain card under her door. _There’s a meteor shower tomorrow night – are you free?_ Then he had scrawled a cell phone number. Well, she assumed it was ‘he’ and she assumed ‘he’ was Bran since he was the only person she knew in the building.

She dialed the number before she had even closed her door properly.

“Hello,” he said.

“You didn’t sign the card.” She lifted to her nose. It didn’t even smell like his distinctive scent of fir trees and maple syrup and something else. Paper perhaps? Something musty. Maybe books.

“Oh, didn’t I?” Bran chuckled. “I’m not very good at this, am I?’

Leah didn’t know what ‘this’ was. She sat on her couch and curled her legs under herself. “I’ve never watched a meteor shower. Do you have a telescope? Do you need a telescope?”

“I do, either way. Are you working tomorrow? I know you said you sometimes work nights.”

“I’m good. I mean – I’m not working. I can rearrange it, even if I planned to work then,” she clarified, not sure why she needed to tell him this. She drew in a deep breath. She wasn’t very good at ‘this’ either. “Anyway. I would love to see a meteor shower.”

“Be warned, if the weather isn’t good, telescope or not we won’t see much. But I thought it was worth a try.”

His warning was a fair one. The next night was heavily overcast and drizzling and he met her at the door with a waterproof jacket and a wince as she handed him the bottle of wine she had brought. “You may need this. It’s also a bit breezy.”

A ‘bit’ was an underestimate. They lasted fifteen minutes, huddled in the three walls of the little kitchen, being battered by wind and rain, staring up at the dark, cloudy sky without a hint of a meteor. She glanced at him and immediately got the giggles. His hair was plastered to his forehead. “This is insane, isn’t it?” he laughed easily. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Downstairs, in his living area, he gave her a towel. “For your hair,” he added. He picked up a device from the mantelpiece and used it to turn the fireplace on. She admired this modern convenience. “Yes, certainly beats whittling sticks.”

“Or flint,” she murmured, watching the flames. It had been a while since she’d had a fire, even a gas one like this was. She rested her head on the armrest, transfixed.

He dropped down onto the armchair adjacent to her, sighing. “We could watch a movie?”

She risked a glance at him and saw he was staring at the flames too. He looked reasonably content. “I’m fine just… sitting here.” She was tempted to say _just talking_ but thought that might sound embarrassingly sappy. She hadn’t ‘just talked’ to anyone in years, not like the last evening she had spent with him.

“Why don’t you tell me about your day, instead?” Bran suggested.

“Why don’t you tell me about _yours_?” she teased, remembering how little she had learnt about him before.

Bran smiled. “I spent most of my day editing a book for a friend.”

“What book? What friend?”

“His name is Tag and he is writing a book about Waterloo.”

“Presumably the Battle of?”

“Just so. It’s, hmm, I suppose you could say historical non-fiction, though it’s written in the first person from his own recollections. It’s nine-hundred pages and rather hard going.” Bran exhaled and, as if the thought made him fitful, ran a hand through his hair so it stuck upright. “I fear we will be making edits forever.”

“Is this what you do? Edit books?”

“Oh, not particularly _just_ that. I do a little translation. I speak a few languages,” he admitted.

“Really? How many?”

“A dozen or so.” Bran waved a hand airily. “Some are more archaic, however. A Mexican would struggle with my Spanish.”

“Latin?” she checked.

“Yes, of course.” His voice was stern.

She grinned. She liked his stern-professor voice and took no offense from it. “You say this like everyone should know Latin. I know English, bad English and Spanish,” she added, attempting to shock him.

It didn’t work. Bran just looked entertained. “If you know Spanish then Italian wouldn’t be a stretch. French too. The _Latin_ would help.”

Leah stuck out her tongue. “I’m not learning Latin.”

He sighed, as if this was very, very sad. “Didn’t you say your father was Dutch?”

“He was. I knew a little, when I was a child, but for the most part they only spoke to me in English. My mother was English.”

They talked a little, then, of how 19th Century America had been a hodge-podge of cultures and languages and how nothing much had really changed on that front. Leah’s pack had been, originally, mostly Spanish-speaking, which was why it was the language she was most familiar with after English.

“It’s more useful, these days,” Bran admitted. “In some states it feels like it’s the first language of America than English. Have you travelled much? Since you became emancipated?”

She nodded. “Almost everywhere in the United States. It was on my ‘bucket list’.”

Being female, and unmated, Leah had not been given much opportunity to travel before and she had devoured articles about other states, other cities, planning where she would go to when she was finally emancipated.

Travelling outside of the United States was trickier, of course, though she longed to. The US had a special relationship with werewolves – comparatively more tolerant than anywhere else in the world.

Werewolves had been ‘public’ since 1767, when the Beast of Gévaudan was captured and taken on tour of Europe for humans to witness its change from monster to man and vice versa. In the years after Jean Chastel, werewolves were hunted to near extinction and those that weren’t fled Europe for the New World, where they could hide in the wide open spaces, temporarily untouched by human-kind.

This didn’t last, of course, and a werewolf council was formed to ‘negotiate’ with the humans. In those days, their numbers had been secret and the humans were kept in the dark, thinking that there might be a potential army of hundreds of thousands of creatures waiting to rise up unless their needs were met.

They knew now, of course, that there wasn’t and those original agreements had slowly been eroded over time, the werewolf council all but powerless and werewolves were ‘policed’ by the human-controlled Bureau of Werewolf Affairs.

Still, it was better than Europe, where werewolves were without any rights at all and most lived desperately secret lives. There were even some countries where hunting werewolves was still a legal sport. 

“Bucket list?” Bran queried.

“It’s a list you have of things to do before you die. Or ‘kick the bucket’.”

His expression cleared. “Bucket list. How charming. I wonder what would be on mine?” He didn’t seem to want to answer that, instead turning the question back to her. “Did you stay anywhere long?”

Leah had noticed that he had managed to avoid answering any more questions about himself. Again. “A few years here and there. It depends on the work I can get.”

He nodded, as if he understood. “It’s challenging.”

“There’s usually something but the legitimate jobs are never particularly well-paid. And there’s a lot of hostility.”

“Even though you’re a woman?”

“Sometimes especially because. Particularly in security gigs.” She shrugged this mystery off. “I like being an Uber driver. It can be boring but at least your time is your own and you work alone.”

They drifted into silence for a while, a perfectly comfortable one with the backdrop of the rain and the wind on his windows. He moved suddenly and she jumped but all he said was, “Would you like a macaron?” he asked, holding out a pretty box to her, emblazoned with a silver logo. “They’re my favorite.”

*

Serena had called Leah several times to try to convince her to go to the ‘mixer’ on Friday, sounding as if Leah was something on her To Do list that she needed to tick off. The final attempt was made Wednesday afternoon, two days before said occasion.

“I really don’t want to,” Leah said, turning off the hand-held vacuum cleaner she was using to detail her car. She had done an early morning shift and it had involved many children whose parents had decided Uber was the way to take their beloved offspring to their expensive private schools. There were a lot of crumbs involved in conveying children, apparently.

“But _why_?” she said plaintively.

“You are only asking because Yulia ordered you to.”

Serena grunted an acknowledgement of that. “And it might be fun. I know Martin.”

She struggled momentarily to remember who Martin was. Oh yes, the gentleman with the free champagne. “Champagne is not worth what I’m sure is going to be incredibly awkward chit-chat.”

Incredibly awkward chit-chat with, to be frank, werewolves who were significantly wealthier than Leah and had bought their own condos outright. Rather than inheriting them from a woman with dubious morals who was, oh yes, killed for her depravities. 

“Oh, it won’t be that bad,” Serena said. “Look, just give it a chance. One hour. Then you’ll never have to do it again. The mixer starts at six. You can go to work immediately afterwards.”

Leah sighed and rested her chin on the roof of her car, watching a guy park an expensive Mercedes very carefully a couple of spaces over from her. “I really don’t want to.”

“I’ll give you twenty-five-percent off access to the gym and pool for six months. There’s a women’s hour every day.”

“Goodness, you really do want me to go.”

Serena said nothing, gave Leah a chance to think about it. The dent in the savings she was building towards buying a new couch really kept getting bigger but she had checked out the gym only that week and had to admit the idea of using the facilities was appealing. More so now that she knew there was an explicit hour for women.

As she’d imagined, most of the time the gym was occupied by aggressively grunting werewolf men flexing for one another. The testosterone was almost impenetrable.

“Fifty percent,” Leah said, testing Serena’s dedication.

“Thirty. It’s the best I can do.”

“Done.”

“Amazing. Wear a dress.” Serena hung up.

The last time Leah had willingly worn a ‘dress’ was 1936 and thereafter any occasions that her Alpha’s mate thought needed one required a direct order from Leah’s Alpha for her to obey. Even then, for years she had stubbornly worn the same one – a poplin smock dress she’d made herself and was _atrociously_ ugly. In the end, her Alpha gave up ordering her and Leah made sure she looked presentable and appropriately dressed but in pants.

She called Serena back, wondering if this was a dress code thing or just the usual sexism, but she didn’t pick up. Leah didn’t think people could enforce dresses as a dress code. Could they?

Then it occurred to her that Bran had attended one of these mixers and she could just ask him. She admitted this gave her a good excuse to call him since it had been a week since the failed meteor shower viewing. When she’d left, he’d given her the rest of the box of macarons and she hadn’t eaten the last one for some sentimental reason she didn’t want to look too closely at. 

She found his number in her previously called numbers and quickly added it to her Contacts. Then she called him.

“Hello, Leah,” he said, gratifyingly revealing that he had saved her number, too. “How are you?”

“Hello, Bran. I’m good. I hope you are, as well?”

“Tolerable.”

She didn’t know what to say about that. He really did sound like he was just ‘tolerable’ but she didn’t know him well enough to ask what had made him sound so flat. “I have called for some advice.”

“Oh, indeed?”

“Serena wants me to go to the mixer on Friday night. Tell me, are they as hideously awkward as they sound?”

“I’ve never been.”

“Oh, I thought I saw you leave one once.”

“Ah, yes. You’re right. Only temporarily. My son, Samuel, insisted that I meet him there. He thinks I should socialize more. I spoke to him for half an hour, profusely irritated him by not engaging with anyone else, and then left him with Serena herself.”

Leah thought she heard him smile as he delivered this. She supposed it was a father’s right to torment his sons. “Well. Did it appear awkward?”

“Most people seemed to know each other,” he said, considering. “I imagine they’re rabidly curious about you.”

This, too, she had wondered. She had noted many people staring but she had been stared at all her life. As a rule, she ignored prying eyes. She’d been told this made her look arrogant. “Is there a dress code? Were the women… dressed up?”

“Not that I recall. But then I didn’t particularly look.”

“Hmm.”

“Are you considering going?”

“Serena gave me an offer I would be stupid to refuse.” Leah sighed. “She is under orders from her Alpha’s mate to introduce me. I think giving in early would make her life, and mine, easier.”

Bran was silent for a moment. “Why would Yulia Hopper want to introduce you around, I wonder?” he mused.

“I think she pities me.” It had been the only explanation Leah could think of as well. “Do you know her well?”

“Her mate better,” he clarified. “I would consider Angus to be… a friend.”

From the way he said it, that was unusual for him. “Would you like to go with me?” she asked, spontaneously.

“To the mixer?”

“Yes.”

“I… don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Though she hadn’t had enough time to get invested in the idea, she was momentarily hurt by the rejection. “Oh, of course, that’s fine.”

“No, I mean— I have something of a reputation. If we went together, you wouldn’t get a true reaction. You would be tainted, for lack of a better word, by my presence. Better you go yourself and see what it’s like. And we go another time. Together,” he added.

This went a long way to salving Leah’s pride and also she found the thought that they would do anything ‘together’ very uplifting. “That sounds sensible. What kind of reputation?” she asked, as if she didn’t know already.

“I’m not sure. Something of a cross between Bruce Wayne and a hoarder, I think.”

She laughed. “A hoarder?”

“Yes, the creepy old guy in the attic.”

She laughed even harder. “Some attic,” she said.

They ended the call with a few more commonplaces. He wished her an enjoyable time. Then she hung up and went to review her wardrobe choices.

*

Leah didn’t wear a dress because she bowed to no man, or woman, on her lifestyle choices any more and wasn’t about to start, even for a discount. Instead, she wore a pair of close-fitting smart black pants, some nude heels, a silky peacock-blue blouse that she had bought in a Christmas sale a few years before and rarely worn, and she left her hair down. Normally she wore it in a French braid or in a tightly woven topknot. It was long and thick and had a natural wave and was in her opinion her best feature but tended to get in the way.

“Goodness. I didn’t recognize you,” Serena said, satisfyingly surprised.

“Do you dye your hair every week?” Leah was startled into asking. Serena’s hair was blue and tightly curled. She was wearing what could only be described as a tight, black, sleeve that was masquerading as a dress which highlighted every single curve on Serena’s body and stopped about two inches below her butt. Leah considered herself to be a confident woman, proud of her body, but would never dare to wear something that revealing. She wondered how old, or young, Serena was.

Serena blinked and then smiled slowly. “No. _Wigs_.”

“Oh. That makes much more sense.”

Leah felt stupid. Each time a werewolf changed, their body would ‘revert’ to the pattern of the original. Maintaining any body alterations – dyed hair, nail polish, pierced ears – was either impossible or simply costly to repeat. Though she had occasionally dabbled in nail polish, Leah liked to change into her wolf more frequently than most and it had been a wasteful habit to get used to so she had for the most part stopped. 

Serena drew her attention to a man holding two glasses. “So we have normal champagne and champagne _plus._ ”

“What’s champagne plus?”

“It’s kind of werewolf champagne.”

Leah had never heard of it. “Which is?”

She waved a be-ringed hand. “It has a kick to it, let’s say that. Though, you probably wouldn’t want to be driving afterwards.” So thinking, Serena took the glass from the man’s left hand, presumably the ‘normal’ champagne, and handed it to her. Leah still sniffed it suspiciously.

“Martin,” Serena said, “this is Leah. Leah, this is Martin. He’s the Manager here.”

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Werewolf, Leah thought. Not particularly dominant. She smiled politely. “Delighted to be here,” she said drily, discretely looking him up and down. Tall, with olive skin and black hair, he had sparkling grey eyes and a dimple in his left cheek. He was handsome, in a ubiquitous way.

Serena grinned. She took the other glass from him. “I bribed her to come here, Martin.”

They settled into what looked like a well-trodden flirting routine. Leah looked around the bar, a place she had only passed by previously and never really acknowledged. Not really a drinker, and certainly lacking in the friends department, a bar wasn’t a place she had expected to spend much time. It was dark, the only lighting coming from the floor, and from spotlights lighting up the bottles at the back of the bar. There was a lot of black, silver-speckled marble – the floor tiles, the tables, the bar itself – and she knew the tall windows that looked out onto the sidewalk were one way. The werewolves and their guests could look out but the humans couldn’t look in.

There were a few guests, though it was early. A table with two men by the window. A couple at the bar – the female was human. Loitering close to where a small table with two champagne buckets and glasses was set up were a trio of werewolf men. All were looking at Serena, Martin and Leah.

No, Leah thought, sipping her champagne and turning to study the back of the bar as if it was the most interesting thing in the room. They were staring at her.

In her experience, any eye contact would lead to conversation so she endeavored to avoid looking at them.

Oh, wait, that was the point of this thing, wasn’t it?

“Come, let me introduce you to the terrible trio over there,” Serena sighed, “before they start panting and embarrass themselves.”

There followed a fairly standard conversation between two unmated werewolf females and three unmated – as she discovered – werewolf males. Even though they were all ostensibly friends, they each tried to one-up each other in increasingly unsubtle ways.

They all worked in security. Not unusual. Daniel had his own private company, Yacob managed a large department in a multi-national security firm, Aarush had what he made sound like a more ‘black ops’ style role working for the government. Daniel used to be a firefighter and had a lovely smile which Leah imagined had wooed many a woman he’d swept from burning buildings. He had saved _lots_ of lives, apparently. Aarush and Yacob rolled their eyes theatrically as he delivered this statement, to Leah’s amusement.

They were reasonably good-natured, the three of them. She thought the conversation had been saved by their obvious affection for one another.

“Are you all from the same pack?” she asked.

“We are,” Yacob pointed to Daniel and himself. “Aarush is from out East. He works here six months of the year. For _top secret reasons._ ” This last was delivered in tones of a long-standing joke. Daniel snickered. Aarush said nothing, his face carefully blank.

“What’s it like working for the government?” Leah asked.

“No different than working for a private firm. It has its good and bad moments. My CO is a decent guy,” he replied, evenly, “and respects what I do.”

“Pay’s terrible, though,” Yacob said, slapping his friend on the back. “Admit it.”

Aarush sighed. “There’s more to this life than money, Yacob.”

Leah had seen the glint of a Rolex on Aarush’s wrist and rather thought he didn’t believe that. “So are you part of Angus’s pack? Like Serena?” she asked Daniel and Yacob, sensing Aarush wasn’t going to share any juicy details of the human government.

“Second and third,” Serena pre-empted their answers, pointing to Daniel and than Yacob. She finished her glass of champagne and promptly helped herself to another, once again from the ‘champagne plus’ side.

“Ah,” Leah said. That partly explained the dynamic. “For a long time?”

“All my life,” Daniel replied with a smile Leah didn’t understand.

Yacob shook his head. “Twelve years. I was born in Ethiopia. My family moved to the US after I was Changed.”

“My goodness,” Leah said. He was black – with closely cropped hair and a neat beard - but had no trace of any accent other than American. “I don’t think I knew there were werewolves in Africa.”

“I was statistically very unlucky. Or lucky, depending on how you feel about it.” He took a sip of his drink – unlike the others, he was drinking a soft drink.

“Fascinating.” It was. She would have loved to ask more questions about his native country but was interrupted by her own cell phone. She had set an alarm and though her first taste of the ‘mixer’ hadn’t been awful, she was still resolute about leaving. She looked at the screen and pulled a face. “Oh. I have to go.” All three men appeared disappointed which was flattering but Leah was utterly unmoved. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Serena. Gentlemen,” she said, nodding to the trio.

“Will you be here next week, Leah?” Daniel asked casually.

Serena gave Leah pleading eyes. “Maybe,” she said before making her escape.

Leah realized two things, as she made her way across the lobby. One, that they hadn’t once asked her a question about herself. Two, that she was looking forward to the next time she went with Bran.

*

The gym was a dream and Leah couldn’t believe four months ago she was living in a tiny one-bed above a garage in the Tri-Cities and now she was signing up to Capoeira classes.

She didn’t have an appropriate swimsuit so she hadn’t tried the pool out yet but she was anticipating enjoying that as well. She was already mentally reviewing her budget to see if she could afford to pay for access after her six months were up.

Leah bumped into Bran as she was leaving the changing area after the women’s hour. He was carrying a small bag and was so focused on his destination of the men’s changing room that he only saw her at the last minute. The change of his expression from frowning concentration to pleasure was dramatic.

“Good morning,” he said, warmly. “How are you?”

“Great!” Because she was. “I just signed up for Capoeira classes.”

“How adventurous. I’ll admit I’ve never ventured into the gym.”

“Swimming more your thing?”

“I find it quiets the mind,” he murmured. “What are you up to today? Work?”

“I’ve taken today off,” she said. Every other week, she took a day off. She’d found not working seven days a week hugely improved her ability to retain the four point six stars of her Uber profile and not, say, eject her passengers through the front windscreen. 

“Why don’t you come for tea this afternoon, then? You can tell me about Friday,” Bran suggested.

This was the second invitation for ‘tea’ she’d had in the space of a couple of weeks. Was it something rich people just did? She much preferred coffee. “I’d like that. Shall I bring anything?”

“Just yourself.”

Naturally, Leah couldn’t fathom _not_ bringing anything. Last time, she had brought a bottle of wine but that had been a nighttime occasion. This was tea. What did you bring to tea? She had half a mind to look up the place where he bought his macarons but in the end just went to the nearest grocery store and bought a couple of fancy packets of cookies. And then a small peace lily for her apartment.

They had tea in the library because, of course, Bran had a library. It was probably the ‘coziest’ room she had seen in his condo, being only one level. The room had floor to ceiling wooden bookshelves, with a fireplace, two old and beaten leather couches, and a desk where she thought he probably spent his time working, judging from the piles of paper and the fancy laptop.

He poured her tea and then, out of nowhere said, “Would you like to have sex with me?” This was a apparently posed not as a question but as an offer.

Despite knowing that _might_ have the direction they were going in, Leah’s hand holding the teacup shook in shock. She was briefly disappointed that the pretense of some kind of male-female werewolf friendship had been so neatly broken. “Would I like to have sex with you?” she repeated.

“You _are_ attracted to me,” Bran pointed out, as if they were discussing the weather and not, say, her biological reaction to him.

She pulled her head back, as if offended. “Thank you for pointing that out.”

His brow crinkled. “So you don’t want to?”

“That’s not what I said.” Leah swallowed. “Usually men–” She waved her free arm around, the other clutching her teacup and saucer to her chest. What she wanted to say was _usually_ when a man propositioned her, he suggested dinner first. Or drinks. There was at least a pretext of civility before the main act.

Then she realized that they’d eaten together. They’d even had drinks. They were having _tea_ now. He’d made little sandwiches. Hmm.

“So you do?”

“Could you stop speaking for just one moment?” she asked, holding up her index finger. “I need to think.”

Bran nodded and folded his hands patiently at his front. Then, as if he was breaking a rule, nipped forward to get one of her cookies from the plate he had arranged them on and popped it into his mouth, chewing quickly.

She stared at him, crossly, mentally reviewing every occasion that they’d met. “Have you been planning this? Since the tennis ball?”

“No,” he said firmly, truthfully.

“Since the take out? Or the meteor shower?”

“The thought might have crossed my mind. But it really wasn’t any kind of machination, I assure you. It’s just… been some time for me,” he admitted. “And I thought you might be amenable. I’m sorry this came as such a surprise.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean by ‘amenable’?”

Bran blinked at her. He stood and walked over to one of the shelves and pulled off, yes, a dictionary. She started to roll her eyes as he flicked through. “Hmm. It says here ‘ _open and responsive to suggestion; easily persuaded or controlled_ ’. I’m more in the former than the latter, if that is helpful to you. I doubt anyone has ever managed to control you.”

She bared her teeth. “They have tried.”

“And failed, I should imagine. You must have been a terrible trial to your Alpha,” he said cheekily.

“Terrible,” she agreed. Worse than terrible. Though he had certainly got one up on her in the end. She blew out a breath. “So, let me get this straight – are you looking for no-strings sex?”

He looked at her blankly. “I have no idea what strings have to do with anything. Do you mean bonds?”

Something darkened in his eyes and Leah hurried to correct him, unsure if it was pain or anger but wanting to see neither. “It’s an expression. It means… well, it does mean no ties but I suspect it probably refers more to emotional ones.”

“Oh, yes, that, definitely that.” He looked thrilled.

Leah, who had only ever had ‘no-strings sex’, as the humans put it, was amused but careful. “In my experience, werewolf men forget that it’s not just sex.”

They became possessive and demanding. She had started to put time limits on such endeavors, fucking them – a coarse but apt term – for only a few weeks before ending it and the inevitable conversation about whether she would be interested in something more permanent. Humans would have been easier but she was rarely ever attracted to them.

Bran smiled obliquely. “I think you already know that I am not like most werewolf men.”

That was certainly true.

He seemed to think he needed to clarify this further. “I am perhaps more practical than most. And I enjoy your company. And I think you enjoy mine?”

This last he phrased as a question so she nodded her head. She did.

“And neither of us want… a relationship. Ties,” he amended, with a quirk in the corner of his mouth.

She nodded again, though she had not known that about him. She supposed she had always thought a man wanted a mate. “All right, then,” she said, slowly. She couldn’t deny she found him attractive. Appealing, even. Then, “Now?”

It was Bran’s turn to recoil slightly. “Now? I—” He seemed to look around his library, as if judging it for its viability. “I thought, perhaps, a bed? More traditionally?”

She emitted a hum of laughter. “I wasn’t suggesting _here_ and now.” Though, the rug by the fire looked reasonably soft. She’d certainly had worse.

Bran followed her eyes and seemed to smile with his own. “I see. Well, perhaps afterwards. But, no, the first time, I think, should be in a bed.” He nodded, as if he had decided that was right and proper. “And I’ll make you dinner first.”

Leah nodded. At least some things remained the same, even if she had never actually been in a position to _schedule_ sex before. “I’d like that. When?”

“Oh, I suppose, are you free tomorrow?” He fidgeted slightly.

Very quietly, Leah took in a deep breath through her nose. She smiled. He wanted her. “I could do tonight if you’d like,” she said knowingly.

Bran frowned at her. “ _Tomorrow_.” He lifted his chin. “Good things come to those who wait.”

*

The consequence of ‘waiting’ gave Leah the unfortunate opportunity to overthink the situation. She wasn’t normally an over-thinker, being much more of a reactionary person, and she even wondered _why_ she was suddenly overthinking this.

All her life, Leah had relied on her instincts. And, truthfully, her instincts had told her that werewolves of the opposite sex, who desired the opposite sex, didn’t have friendships. That sleeping together was the inevitable culmination of the interactions she had been having so far with Bran.

Whilst Bran was, as he put it, ‘not like other werewolf men’, that didn’t mean there weren’t similarities. There clearly were.

And she _was_ attracted to him.

She just didn’t know that much about him. And what she did know set them very far apart even if he didn’t acknowledge it. Bran was very, very rich. She wasn’t. He was clearly extremely clever and cultured. She was… not. Leah could admit that. She had common sense but couldn’t admit to any higher education, not even comparable to today’s high school.

They probably had some similar life experiences, having lived through some significant world altering events. But you couldn’t talk about history alone all the time. At some point you had to talk about the present and her present was pretty dull. She dreaded the idea that he might find her boring. 

Maybe that was what would happen. Maybe he would find her boring before he became possessive?

Having sex was a good idea, she told herself firmly. Get it over with. See what would happen after that.

She chose her outfit for that evening very carefully. Nice lingerie – not _too_ nice so that it would look like she had tried too hard – and a loose, soft cream sweater that she thought made her look more curvaceous than she was. A pair of black jeans and the same heels she had worn to the mixer that wouldn’t take her over Bran’s height. Not that she thought Bran had such vanity, actually.

Leah bought a bottle of wine, this time asking in the store for help choosing a nice one and spending more money than she ever had cause to. She even put it in a nice little gift bag which swung in her hand as she made her way across the lobby to his private elevator.

She pressed the button that called up to him and he answered. “Hello. I’m sending the car down to you.”

She had butterflies, actual butterflies, she thought, pressing a hand to her stomach. When it arrived, Leah stepped into the elevator and turned, pushing out a calming breath. This was fine. She could do this.

Bran was standing waiting for her when the doors opened and she got another burst of butterflies. He was smiling. He, too, had dressed up in nice pants and a checked shirt that he had tucked in. He still had tennis shoes on. Apparently this was his ‘thing’.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she replied, staring at him. She had worn her hair down and she shook it, trying to get some of her usual confidence. _Just sex_ , she told herself. She held out the gift. “For you.”

“How lovely,” Bran replied, taking it but still looking at her. “You are very beautiful.”

Leah had been called beautiful many times. She could count on one hand the times it had felt meaningful. She found herself blushing. “Thank you.”

At his beckoning, she followed him into the kitchen. “Something smells amazing,” she said. There was a large, cast iron pot on the stove. The rest of the kitchen was immaculate as before. 

“Chicken cacciatore. I suppose I should have asked if you have any dislikes. I assumed you didn’t.” He opened the wine she had brought, the cork popping through the opening with a satisfying noise.

She smiled and leaned a hip against the counter. She felt like she was getting a handle on her nerves now. He was a very soothing person. She liked looking at him. “Surely no one born before the age of refrigeration is truly picky?”

“You would be surprised. My eldest son hates fish.”

Samuel. He was the eldest. “All fish?”

“All fish. This also smells amazing, by the way. Thank you,” Bran said, as he decanted the wine because of course he had a wine decanter. “I think it should breathe for a little while. May I offer you something else? Oh. Wait.”

He moved and one moment he was standing a few feet away, the next he was looking into her eyes, holding his hands lightly around her face, the tips of his fingers pressing intermittently, as if he was massaging her. It was relaxing and yet, because Leah had never been the focus of such intensity before, it was a little overwhelming. Her mouth felt suddenly bone dry, all the air in her lungs disappearing.

Up close she could see the gold flecks in his eyes and that he definitely smelled like books.

He was going to kiss her. She wished he would kiss her already.

Or perhaps she should kiss him? She remembered that she was a strong, independent lone wolf and that she _could_ kiss him.

But she didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Slowly, he lowered his head and touched his lips to hers. That was all. His eyes fluttered closed and she let hers drift shut as well. His kiss was nothing more than a gentle press of his mouth against hers. So gentle. 

He ran the very tip, the point of his tongue, along the edge of her lower lip and she felt her mouth soften. His tongue slipped into the small parting between her lips and he lightly kissed her cupid’s bow before drawing it into his mouth and sucking.

Realizing that she was just standing there like a lemon, Leah opened her mouth further, sucking his tongue in, kissing him back. He made a pleased noise, his hands threading back through her hair, expertly scraping her scalp in a way that made her back arch. 

_Uh oh_ , she thought. She hadn’t, actually, thought too deeply about the sex part of the evening. She knew how to have sex. There really were a limited number of ways two bodies could come together. And she was, she was confident, good at it having had a respectable degree of practice for her age.

It hadn’t really occurred to her that _he_ might be more than good. That he might be spectacular.

 _Uh oh,_ she thought, again.

“There,” Bran said, pulling back finally and smiling, his hazel eyes half shuttered. “That should make things easier, shouldn’t it?”

Leah was wide-eyed. Her brain had, surely, leaked out of her ears. She was tempted to check. “Oh, yes,” she said, clearing her throat. “Much.”

*

They ate dinner and throughout the meal, in the few pauses between conversation, Leah’s mind drifted back to being kissed by him. She had to clench her thighs together against the incessant buzzing between them.

“Would you like go up to the roof? It’s a warm night,” Bran suggested, as she helped him clear the table.

She did. He picked up the remaining wine and she took their glasses. 

On the roof – which still took her breath away - there was a rug spread on the ground and she looked at him suspiciously. “I thought you wanted a bed?”

“This is, in a way. Do you mind?” He put the wine down on a carved log that she imagined he always used for a table and she put the glasses next to it. He held out his hand to her and she took it without thinking. She had never reached for a man’s hand without hesitation before.

He escorted her – yes, _escorted her_ – to the rug and then toed off his sneakers. She followed suit.

“Lie down,” he told her.

The butterflies returned in her stomach. This was happening, she thought, as she sank down onto the blanket. She lay back, staring up at the canopy of trees. Bran lay next to her, propping himself up on his elbow. “You’re nervous,” he said, sounding a little teasing.

“ _No_ ,” she denied, in a terrible attempt at a lie.

Bran laughed at her and rested one hand on her abdomen. “I can assure you, I have more reason to be nervous than you.”

She doubted that.

He kissed her again and, just like before, Leah found herself lying there, _being_ expertly kissed, having her face gently held, his mouth exploring her. He parted her lips, his tongue slipping inside politely like she was delicate, like he was savoring her. She had to keep reminding herself to breathe. His hand stroked up and down her stomach, over her sweater, and she found herself moving underneath it, as if he was touching some erogenous zone. Her nipples were rock hard and he hadn’t even touched her breasts.

Bran stopped kissing her by taking increasingly smaller, sipping kisses. “Good?” he asked.

She found herself lifting her head, chasing his mouth. “Um-hmm.”

“Shall we,” he touched the hem of her sweater.

Oh, God, they weren’t even undressed yet. She was _this turned on_ and he hadn’t removed a single item of clothing.

Leah nodded and made herself reach for the button of his shirt. She would undress him first, she decided, slipping each button through. Actually – she pushed and he rolled easily onto his back so she could part his shirt, so she could look at him. He had a runners build, with a toned, lightly muscled torso. His skin was smooth, only a little hair clustered in the center of his chest, trailing down below the waistband of his pants. He had scars. She frowned. How did he have scars?

She traced one with her finger.

“Witch,” he said, answering her unasked question.

She looked at his face and forgot to breathe again. The way he was looking at her made every inch of her body feel excruciatingly sensitized. _Just_ his look did that, she thought.

Quickly, she pulled off her sweater, her hair crackling with static. This time he pushed her onto her back and she went willingly. Bran seemed torn between touching her hair and running his fingers very lightly over her breasts, held in her pretty lace bra, her taut nipples pushing against the fabric. She hissed as he grazed one, and then the other.

Impatient, Leah tugged his shirt off his shoulders and he shrugged it off, not sparing a glance for where he threw it. He kissed her mouth once and then turned his attention to her neck, his hand smoothing over her bare stomach, making the muscles beneath it tense and flicker.

Leah looked up at the tree canopy above, hearing her own quiet gasps amongst the rustle of the leaves and the distant sounds of the city. He undid the button of her pants and slid his hand inside, grazing over her panties and cupping her.

Her hips bucked against him and she felt him smile.

Having quite enough of being passive, concerned she might expire from lust before he was even inside her, she wriggled until she could get hold of his pants and quickly undid them. “Off,” she told him.

He was laughing at her, silently, in the way she was learning he did with his eyes alone. Not taking his gaze from her, he shucked his pants and she removed hers. She reached behind herself to undo her bra. “Oh, no, I get to do that,” he said. He knelt beside her and his fingers replaced hers. He kissed her, sucking on her bottom lip. “This pout kills me.”

She hadn’t realized she was pouting. She dropped her eyes helplessly to his jockey shorts, where she could see him straining against the soft material. She brushed her fingers against him, cupping him, and was gratified to feel him shiver. Good. She wasn’t the only one, then.

She lay back when he hooked his fingers into the elastic waistband of her panties, and dragged them down her thighs. Leah knew men. As he looked his fill of her body, she raised her knees and spread her thighs. She could feel how wet she was, the cool air tickling her sensitive, heated flesh. She knew he could smell her desire, had probably been able to whilst they had been eating dinner. For Leah, this entire evening had been some excruciatingly exquisite form of foreplay.

Bran’s long fingers went to touch his mouth, briefly, and he stared between her legs, just stared, like he was hungry for her. Then he stripped off his shorts – her mouth dropped open in anticipation at the sight of his hard cock – and he crawled between her legs and held himself above her. “Is there anything you want?” he asked, thumbs caressing the tender inner skin of her thighs.

Leah could only think of one thing and it was currently resting against her leg. “I want you inside me,” she said, licking her lips. 

Bran nodded. She helped guide the head of him to her entrance, feeling the bulbous head catch. Maybe normally, she would have wanted to play with her clit a little, but she honestly felt so overstimulated that she thought he would be enough. He certainly _looked_ like he would be enough.

Keeping his eyes on her, one hand on her thigh, Bran slowly pushed and her body took him in. He felt big. A little uncomfortable, initially, and he seemed to know this because he paused to catch the gasp she emitted with his mouth, to run his hands over her. He cupped her breasts and openly admired them, his expression very soft. “You’re perfect,” he said to her, smiling as if she had done something very clever. His thumbs cruised over her nipples and he lowered his mouth, teasing one with the edge of his teeth. She felt herself clench around him and he did it to the other nipple. The same deal.

 _Uh oh,_ she thought, again.

He began to move, very carefully, drawing himself out to his tip and then sliding all the way back inside. She gasped a second time, this time in pleasure at the sensation of his stretching her, and then he began to build a rhythm that she instinctively tried to match. _Uh oh uh oh uh oh,_ was a litany in her head.

“Shh,” he said soothingly, in between kisses, smoothing his hand down her side and lifting her thigh, opening her wider to receive him. “Shhh.”

She didn’t realize she was making noise. Oh God, was that high pitched sound her? She covered her mouth with her hand, hurriedly, and could feel the puffs of air that was her making those helpless noises each time he thrust. 

Bran lowered his head, pressed soft kisses to her neck, then opened his mouth and laid his teeth on her, just rested them against her skin so that each time she moved to take more of him, his teeth dug in harder. She fully moaned. “I’m going to come,” she told him, sounding shocked at herself. How quickly he had brought her to this, the rising rush of the heat of climax.

“That’s the idea,” he replied, not changing his angle, just hitting the same spot over and over and over again.

She came around him. And it was glorious - a rippling, pulsing, golden heat blooming outwards. He kept going, moving her thighs, lifting her, pushing her knees up to her chest. Her climax seemed to blossom into something deeper, an aching beat, and she kept coming as he thrust within her. 

“That’s it,” he was saying, murmurs of encouragement, “that’s it.” He switched to another language, one she didn’t know, then his thrusts became more frenetic – she was making short, sharp cries of pleasure now, all but given up trying to control herself – and then he froze, their bodies pressed together as he pumped inside her.

Bran trembled and she watched his face - the surprised relief, his lips parted slightly and eyes wide open as he finished. He let out one, quiet sigh and then relaxed. He gave her a loose smile. “I apologize. That was a little quicker than I was hoping.”

“Not at all,” she replied, honestly, body thrumming with the after-shocks of pleasure. Any longer and she might have spontaneously combusted.

He gently parted them, looking down between their bodies to watch, which gave her a little shivery-feeling. He rolled to her side, propping himself up on his elbow as he had before.

Bran reached over and delicately pulled a leaf from her hair, still smiling a little. “You’re very kind.”

Leah was many things. Kind was not one of them. “I’m not, actually. I thought you said it had been a while?” Men who had not had sex for ‘a while’ did not usually have that level of finesse. Not werewolf men, in any case.

“It has.”

“What, a few months? A couple of years?”

“More in the years area,” he said obliquely.

Leah guessed admitting to a timescale between lovers was probably uncouth. It had been a few months for her. And he had been human. It had been a one-off. “It was amazing,” she said, bluntly. “I’ve never had sex like it.”

He frowned. “That’s disappointing.”

“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” she laughed. She felt fantastic. Like she could run for miles. Rejuvenated. Wow.

She wondered how soon he could go again.

*

After her third attempt to single-handedly pick up and maneuver her couch, Leah got out her cell phone. “I don’t suppose you’re free? Right now? I just— I’m having my new couch delivered tomorrow and I need to get rid of the old ones. I’m having trouble finagling it on my own.”

“Bonus points for the use of ‘finagling’,” Bran said. “Yes, of course. I’ll come right over.”

She sighed in relief – both at the help, which she needed, but also because she hadn’t been absolutely certain if this fell into the ‘no-strings’ agreement or not. Since that first, spectacular time, on the roof, they had seen each other twice more and always at his instigation and always ending in bed.

Not that this was remotely a problem. Apparently mind-blowing orgasms was one of his skillsets.

True to his word, he arrived only a few minutes later. He was wearing grey sweatpants, a white T-shirt and red tennis shoes, the official off-duty look of most werewolves. Leah herself would have been wearing something similar had she not experienced a small crisis of confidence and quickly swapped the sweats for a pair of jeans that made her butt look good.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, oddly formally. It was daylight and this was the first time he had been in her apartment.

“Thank you for having me,” Bran replied. He managed to make it flirtatious. She bit her lip and smiled as he leaned in to kiss her. This grew rather more involved than she thought either of them were expecting and they ended up necking in her open doorway for several minutes, stopping only for proprieties sake when someone opened their own door further down the hall.

“Um. Let’s pick that up… later,” she said, carefully rearranging his T-shirt that she had apparently pushed up in her enthusiasm. Her cheeks felt warm.

Bran was staring at her mouth, swaying slightly towards her. He jerked himself back. “That would be nice.” He stepped inside her apartment.

Experiencing only the briefest moments of embarrassment at the disparity in their living situations, Leah brushed past him and became brisk. “So, I’ve agreed with George that I can leave these down by the recycling area to be collected and he’s said I can use the service elevator. Which is right down the hall, through the fire escape at the top of the stairwell. I’ve had a look and it’ll only take one couch at a time.”

Bran nodded and went to take position at one end of the couch. “Sounds like a plan. Lift on three?”

On three, Leah picked up her end of the couch and they shuffled towards her door. Almost immediately it became apparent that it wouldn’t fit through if they carried it flat.

“Pivot,” Bran said, tilting it to the side.

She giggled and nearly dropped the couch.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, smiling.

“Oh, it’s just – there’s this old show. In one episode, they have to carry a couch and there’s a sketch with one guy yelling ‘pivot’ over and over again. You’d have to see it to really appreciate it.”

“I see.” They twisted the couch and carefully carried it through the door and, with a little back and forth, right down the hall towards the double doors of the fire escape. “I suppose its not got a particularly diverse cast?”

“No. The only werewolf was in Season Three. Phoebe dated one,” she added. It had caused an outcry at the time and was hailed as being a very progressive move given most werewolves that appeared in movies or TV shows were either the violent criminal or the dumb-but-muscled support character to the human hero. “But he moved to Alaska.”

Even Bran had enough popular cultural knowledge to chuckle at that. It was fairly commonplace for werewolves to be written out of a show by them ‘moving’ to Alaska. Leah had no idea why but she had a terrible feeling it probably had something to do with the human belief that because there were _actual_ wolves in Alaska then it made sense there would also be undocumented werewolf packs.

Leah pushed through the double doors of the fire-escape with her back and lowered her end of the couch in front of the elevator, jabbing the button with her elbow.

Bran leaned against the wall as they waited. “What’s your new couch like?”

“Oh,” Leah said, genuinely excited by the prospect, more so than she would ever have imagined being. “It’s one of those corner ones so it’ll free up so much space. I’ll show you a picture when we’re done.” 

With two werewolves it was a reasonably quick job and, back in her apartment, she pulled up a picture of the couch on her cell to show Bran. She then demonstrated how she was going to place it in the room.

“And next I’m going to get new drapes,” she finished, waving her arms at the windows. “I’m looking at some light grey ones at the moment but maybe I’ll go navy, to match the couch. And then I’m going to get gold cushions, I think. And maybe a rug with some kind of gold accent in it. I haven’t found something I like just yet.”

“Sounds lovely.” His eyes swept the room as if he was really trying to envision it. She appreciated the effort given his exquisite interior decoration versus her budget Ikea options. “I’m looking forward to seeing a space that reflects your taste.”

He really was a charming man, she thought.

Then he toed off his sneakers and gave her a cheeky look. “Invite me into your bedroom, Leah,” he requested.

*

They established without discussing it a standing ‘arrangement’ once or twice a week where they cooked together – or rather, he cooked for her, since she was useless at it – and then he took her to bed and pleasured her in every sense of the word. Several times. She usually left first thing in the morning, dazed and loose limbed. 

He was, in a word, unreal. Each time they were together he took her apart and then put her back together again. And he seemed to get new ideas, too. She found herself sitting in traffic, going over her evenings with him, wondering what he was doing when they weren’t together, wondering if he was reading up, watching porn on the side for tips. He seemed to have reviewed every surface in his apartment for its viability. _No, that couch is too high, I won’t get the angle you need_ , he’d say, thoughtfully, _but the kitchen counter is great for eating you out, which is appropriate, isn’t it?_

It wasn’t as if she didn’t give as good as she got. She really, really put the effort in – inspired by his enthusiasm – and he treated everything she did like it was some kind of gift she was giving him.

The first time she went down on him, he stared at her rapturously the entire time, holding her head gently between his hands like she was some kind of treasure, not once thrusting so hard into her mouth that she choked or taking over and pushing her back onto the bed to finish inside of her.

“May I come in your mouth?” he simply asked her politely, gasping softly.

She nodded her affirmative and felt his balls rise up under her fingers, then the first jet of salt on her tongue. She took him in as much as she could, swallowing, trying to imbue this sexual act she had always carried out with a sense of reciprocation with the reverence that he had every time he touched her. 

Afterwards, he sank back, bringing her with him, curling around her and stroking her head. “That was… thank you,” he managed, for once speechless.

Bran kissed her, thoroughly, and she knew he would taste himself on her tongue. She touched his body, running her hands down his back, fingers cruising as they always did over the scars, the curvature of his butt and his strong thighs. She enjoyed him physically in ways that surprised her.

Her alarm went off and she sighed. “I have to go,” she said. Each time she stayed over on a weekday, she set an alarm so that she wouldn’t get caught up and forget herself, which was a distinct possibility with him. There was a degree of flexibility with her job, of course, but there were also patterns to when she would get a steady stream of trips and unfortunately weekday mornings were one of the best times.

As usual, she watched his face out of the corner of her eye as she dressed, checking to see if there was a hint of disapproval or resentment for her leaving. There wasn’t. Bran simply watched her dress with a small, contented smile on his face – as well he might.

With confidence she didn’t feel, Leah said, “I thought I could make you dinner.” She had been practicing, not knowing she had been practicing for him until she had perfected it and immediately wanted to make it for him, demonstrating yet another domestic streak in herself that she hadn’t known existed. Steak – basted with butter and thyme - and fries made from scratch. A big salad with a dressing from a food blog. It wasn’t sophisticated but it was achievable. 

“In your apartment.”

She hesitated because he seemed to be reticent. “That’s… what I imagined. But if you would prefer me to do it here, I could do that.” 

Bran gave her a big, sudden smile. “No, your apartment would be lovely.” 

Leah was pleased. “Maybe after full moon? Thursday?” That would give her a full week to prepare. She needed to put up the new drapes and she had a TV coming, as well.

“I’m free.” He sat up, sheet pooling around his waist. She tried not to sigh at his naked torso. “Speaking of full moon. Would you like to spend it with me? I sometimes drive out and whilst there is no one to throw tennis balls for us, I’m reasonably certain you’d enjoy a good run.”

She had spent her last full moon in the basement again – her third, fourth time? The months were flying by. The novelty of the tennis balls had yet to wear off but he was right, she would enjoy a run. She would love one, in fact. “I would be very amenable to that, too,” she said, leaning over to kiss him goodbye. “I’m excited, in fact. Thank you for the offer.”

Spending full moon together was an intimate thing if you weren’t part of a pack. There was a degree of trust that had to be present. Given they were sleeping together, she knew she had that trust for him – letting a man into your body and to sleep next to you required it – but she hadn’t known it was returned.

The day of full moon, Leah had a frustrating shift, which seemed to be becoming a trend. There was obviously some kind of terrible anti-werewolf conference in town and not only did she find herself having to physical restrain herself from crashing her own car to end the lives of the assholes she was being forced to drive around but the weather was disgusting. Torrential rain meant that every driver on the road was suddenly twenty-five percent more stupid than normal and the traffic was appalling.

She decided to finish early and just give up on the day. Besides, she wanted to wash her hair before she met Bran and it took a while to dry properly.

Leah hadn’t actually seen Bran on or around a full moon. Older wolves felt the call of the moon more than most but her initial impression of him was no different than normal. When she met him in the parking lot on sub-basement floor one, he kissed her hello, just as he always did, lingering a little as if he was reluctant to let go. He asked about her day, holding the car door open for her. His truck was an old Ford, which surprised he. She had been expecting an expensive SUV instead. 

He had made a thermos of coffee, which he now knew she preferred the taste of to tea, and the radio was set to a classical station that made for pleasant background music. It had been a while since someone else had driven her. And his truck was significantly higher up than her hybrid.

It was nice. 

It didn’t take them too long to get out of Seattle now that the rain had cleared from earlier. Moonrise was a few hours away still and its pull – whilst present - was mild, for Leah at least. As she watched him responding to her conversational gambits, she thought he was a little more flushed than usual. He was naturally pale, with four freckles on his nose that she only noticed because she had been up close and personal with him, but tonight there was color in his cheeks. He was a little more frenetic than normal, making more hand gestures. His fingers were tapping the wheel.

“Yes, it’s strong for me,” Bran said drily, noticing her eyes drift to his hands. “Not for you, though.”

If this was ‘strong’ for him, he was dealing with it much better than most. “Not yet.”

“Young ‘un,” he teased. He waggled his eyebrows at her. 

He could be so goofy. She smiled widely and unreservedly at him.

Bran put his hand on her thigh. She was wearing sturdy jeans, though she had packed a change of clothes. Through the thicker material, she could feel that his hand was very hot. She put her own on top of it and he turned his palm, weaving their fingers together.

It had been a long time since she had held hands with man. And she had been human.

Leah looked out of the window, swallowing past a sudden lump in her throat. She watched the landscape go by, only thinking about his hand in hers, trying to keep that noncommittal ground between squeezing too hard and being a limp fish.

She sighed. She was in a little deeper than she had intended now, she thought. Not surprising. From the very first moment, he hadn’t been what she had expected.

As they started to turn into increasingly smaller, winding roads, Bran spoke, “Full disclosure, I actually have a cabin in the forest.”

She tutted. “Of course you do.” 

Bran squeezed her hand and then released so he could change to a lower gear. “Don’t be too excited. It’s extremely basic.”

“Is it, perhaps, still bigger than my apartment?”

He scrunched up his face apologetically. “No?”

She laughed. “Wouldn’t be hard,” she acknowledged.

Ten minutes later, Bran pulled up in front of what looked like every other cabin she had spotted through the trees. She was relieved, having wondered if his version of ‘basic’ was very different to everyone else’s. She immediately felt more comfortable now that she wasn’t going to be treated to the Cornick version of luxury backwoods living.

“Careful, that’s broken, I’ve been meaning to fix that,” he said, pointing out a loose floorboard on the steps up to the small raised deck that wrapped around the front.

Inside was also traditional. An open plan main room with flint fireplace, couch and a very small kitchen. There were two bedrooms, both with doubles, and a small bathroom with shower, basin and toilet. She wondered if he normally stayed out all night as his wolf or if they could sleep here.

“I’ll need to make up the bed,” he said, opening a cedar chest that served as coffee table and apparently as storage for blankets and bed linen.

Guess that answered that.

Leah helped make the bed. The linen smelled strongly of lavender and cloves. It was painfully domestic making a bed with him and she sought to make conversation. “When was the last time you came here?”

“Probably four months ago?” Bran said, flicking out the blanket and frowning. “Maybe five.”

She smoothed down the blanket and folded it at the top of the bed whilst he went off and started to unpack a few things he had brought with them. Fresh milk, from the looks of things. A few other perishables. She wished she’d brought something but then she hadn’t known they would be staying in a cabin.

“Do you want anything to eat? To drink?” he called.

“Coffee would be good.” She came out of the bedroom. Bran was really fidgety now, moving quickly around the small kitchen. It was getting dark but moonrise was still another couple of hours away. “Would it help if you Changed?” she asked.

Bran shook his head. “Better to be human until moonrise.” He started to boil water on the stove.

She smiled. “How about sex?”

“That would certainly be distracting,” he exhaled, slanting her a look. “But it might be a little much right now.”

“Oh really?” she drawled, leaning on the counter.

He nodded, putting instant coffee into two mugs. “Really.”

“Why?” 

Bran turned off the gas and poured the hot water into the mugs. He cleared his throat. “You will have to take my word for that. Come and drink your coffee and let me find some playing cards.”

He was serious about the cards, pulling a deck from a box on the mantelpiece. They were old and worn, a vintage pack featuring – of all things – a cigarette brand. He let her flick through them, curious, and then he took them back, shuffled with the kind of casual expertise card sharks had. “Can you play gin rummy?” he asked.

She scoffed. “Of course.”

Leah didn’t think she did too badly, considering he had a mind like a steel trap. Of course, she had an advantage, given she wasn’t currently suffering from the moon’s siren call as much. At one point, she put her hand on his leg to stop him from twitching and he told her off for being ‘distracting’. This pleased her. She liked that she could distract him.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Bran said, eventually, putting the cards down mid-game and standing, grabbing hold of her arm as he did so and propelling her from the couch towards the bedroom. She might have squeaked in surprise.

The bedroom was dark now and the warm light of the living area shone around Bran as he started undressing. The smell of his desire was potent. Surely she should have noticed that earlier? “How do you _do_ that?” she asked, kicking off her shoes and peeling off her sweater.

“Magic,” he replied, rapidly and enthusiastically naked. He undid the button of her jeans, dipping his head to catch her mouth, humming against her impatiently, hands shoving at the denim that was tight around her waist. He growled as her jeans stuck. “ _Hurry_.”

Giggling, she shimmied her jeans and underwear down, stepped out of them. Leah unclipped her bra and his hands replaced it the moment it was off. She laughed at him and he nipped her bottom lip. “Take pity,” he complained, shuffling her back towards the bed.

“Oof,” she said, as he pushed her backwards and crawled over her. They kissed, Leah dragging Bran down to her so she could rub herself against his warm skin, winding her arms and legs about him, holding him close.

“You smell amazing,” Bran said, moving down her neck, biting the precise spot that made her arch with delight, “have I ever told you that?”

She made a noise that might have been ‘no’ but equally could have been ‘nnrgggh’. She was saved from responding with something sentimental in kind – that he smelled like maple syrup and books and forest to her – because he slithered down her body, spread her legs and buried his face between them. “Holy god, Bran!” she shrieked as he sunk his tongue in her.

With the same enthusiasm he put to everything in bed, Bran brought her right to the edge of a quivering orgasm and then pulled back, grinning like a shark at her expression of abject dissatisfaction. He wiped the back of his hand across his glistening mouth. “Keep an open mind,” he told her mystifyingly, bending her knees to her chest and entering her in one, toe curling stroke.

She grabbed hold of his shoulders as he started pounding into her mindlessly. “Open mind?” she panted. She felt the heat began to re-build from the orgasm he had denied her before and she moaned, clenching her fingers into him. “Oh, oh, oh, please don’t stop!”

Leah hit her crescendo, crying out her rapture, and above her Bran’s eyes shone gold. “ _Change now_ ,” he commanded as he shuddered and finished within her, and for the first time in many years, Leah heard the voice of an Alpha, felt her bones respond with a readiness they had never felt. She liquefied, there was no better description of it, her pulsing body remolding into her better, stronger form.

There was no pain, no pain at all, when she changed.

Moments later, ten, fifteen minutes faster than normal, she was sitting in her wolf form, blinking in astonishment at him. He, too, was a wolf, waiting patiently for her to finish. Small and a mixed grey, with an adorable white-tipped tail. She suspected if she stared long enough he would become a rainbow blur of multiple wolf colors.

It was odd, feeling the echoes of pleasure from an orgasm that this body had not – could not – feel and none of the bone cracking pain that she associated with the change. _How did you do that?_ she asked him. But of course he couldn’t hear her.

 _Wasn’t sure that would still work,_ he said to her, reaching up with a paw to scratch behind a twitching ear.

Leah whined. He could speak to her mind-to-mind? It was normally only a skill an Alpha could have over his pack. _Why can you speak to me?_ she asked, worried that she had agreed to something she hadn’t intended to.

 _If you’re talking to me, I can’t hear you. I can only do this one way._ He jumped off the bed and trotted out of the room, ignoring the distinct scent of her panic.

He was astonishingly powerful, she realized, starting, stopping, and then starting again to follow him, their claws clicking on the hardwood of the cabin floors.

Bran nosed open the back door of the cabin in a clearly well practiced move and then, checking behind him to make sure she was following, he ran out into the night.

*

On the Monday after their full moon together, Leah sent him a reminder about dinner that Thursday.

 _Looking forward to it_ , he replied an hour or so later, not that she was counting. _What time do you want me?_

She wrote _All the time_ and then deleted it, shaking her head at herself. She had it bad. _6pm_. _You don’t need to bring anything_ , she added.

 _We’ll see._ A few minutes later, he sent another message. _By the way,_ _I’ve added you to the guest list for my apartment. Your fob should work on the elevator and the scanner will register your face the first time you use it._

Leah smiled so hard her cheeks hurt. That was a big gesture, wasn’t it?

She had pretty much been on a high since they had spent full moon together. Extreme magical werewolf powers notwithstanding, it had been one of the best full moons of her life. She had tried to rationalize it, telling herself it was because she had spent most of the last twenty alone. That she had missed the companionship of her people on a night that they supposedly owned. That she had been outside, with a werewolf whom she trusted at her back.

They had curled up together at dawn, their bodies coming together once more, slowly, with none of the frenetic energy of their previous coupling. Bran had coaxed her on top of him which meant for once that he was the loud one and she had watched him fall apart as she rose and fell on top of him, gasping out her name as he came. 

With amusement, in the following days, she watched her Uber reviews shift in tone. She received more ‘Great Conversation’ stickers than she ever had before and a few comments about her ‘big smile’. That wouldn’t last long, she thought.

Leah returned home at lunchtime on Thursday and cleaned her small apartment from top to bottom. She rearranged her new decorative cushions on her couch a few times and angled the – also new – blanket strategically across the back so it looked like the one in the picture on the internet. She stripped her bed and changed her bed linen.

At five, she took the steaks out to get to room temperature and started peeling and slicing the potatoes. At five-thirty, the potatoes parboiling, she checked her cell in case he’d sent any messages. Nothing.

Since she didn’t have a dining table, they were going to eat at the breakfast bar, one at the end, the other adjacent, which was better than side by side. She laid out cutlery, water glasses, wine glasses, salt and pepper.

“Should have got place mats,” she muttered to herself.

Leah drained the potatoes, gave them a little shake to fluff up the edges and then set them to steam dry a little bit whilst she put a big pan of oil on high heat and patted down the steak with kitchen towel, seasoned both sides. She had all the ingredients out already and the recipe memorized. She just need to do things in the right order and at the right time. She would wait until he was here to do the steaks, though.

So thinking she put the oven on low to warm the plates. Warm plates were a very civilized thing.

The oil reached the required temperature and Leah put the fan on and proceeded to carefully put the thickly cut potatoes into the hot oil. It sizzled and spat and demonstrated neatly why she had worn her oldest sweatshirt and waited to change her clothes before Bran arrived. Once the fries had turned golden brown, she scooped them out onto kitchen towel, salted them, and set the oil to one side to be dealt with later.

The fan that sat above the stove seemed to have done a good job extracting most of the smell of cooking oil but she still went to light a scented candle for a few minutes, hoping the combination of scents wouldn’t be too off-putting.

At six, she changed her top into a silky vest and put some music on, poured some water into the water glasses, thought about pouring some wine, then decided against. If he brought something, she’d probably serve that.

At fifteen past the hour, she checked her cell – both messages and email, though Bran had never emailed her before. She wondered if it would be pushy to send him a message asking if everything was all right.

She decided it would be fine. It wasn’t as if he had far to go. Or had been caught in traffic. And he had previously been very punctual.

 _Everything okay?_ she typed and sent before she could change her mind.

It was probably something reasonable. She turned up the music and poured herself a little glass of wine, thinking she ought to find out more about the werewolf champagne she had been offered at the mixer.

Five minutes, then ten more passed. Nothing from Bran. She called him, making herself smile because if he answered she wanted to _sound_ like she wasn’t a little annoyed that he was late and hadn’t thought to let her know why.

But the phone kept ringing. He didn’t have a voicemail so she simply hung up.

She tapped her fingers on the kitchen counter, wondering what to do. She absently checked the messages she had sent him previously, just to confirm that she hadn’t lost her mind and suggested another day or a later time. She hadn’t.

Bran was very late. Or he had forgotten. Or something must have happened. 

This was ridiculous, she thought. She _lived in the same building._ She would just go and speak to him. Something must have happened. Bran wasn’t _rude_ or forgetful. Quite the opposite. He had repeatedly demonstrated that he was a gentleman.

She blew out the candle, turned off the oven and set off to find out what was going on.

*

Leah marched across the lobby, hoping she appeared more confident than she felt. She swiped her fob against the scanner before looking into the portal for the face scan. She had a tremulous worry, given there were a few curious eyes on her, that perhaps it wouldn’t work. If it didn’t then she would know that he had lost interest. And then she would sell the condo and move to the other side of the world.

But there was a quiet, happy beep and the doors to the elevator opened. She stepped inside with a small exhale of relief and pressed the ‘close’ button, now keen to be away from the astonished eyes that were staring, watching a woman go up to the penthouse unescorted.

It wasn’t a long journey but in the time it took Leah to get from the lobby to the top, she had reconsidered her actions several times. _What if there was another woman?_ They had never explicitly discussed other partners. Perhaps he was married. Or dating someone else and they had turned up unexpectedly.

Leah dismissed this. She would have smelled another woman on him, on his apartment. She just would have known.

 _What if he had changed his mind?_ _Forgotten?_ Could she handle being forgotten? She supposed that depended on whether he was apologetic or not. He would really have to be theatrically apologetic for her to forgive him for that.

Ultimately she started to wonder - did she really know him that well?

The doors opened and the hallway was dark.

Her first sinking thought was that he was away. That he had been called away with telling her and had forgotten her entirely.

Then, as her eyes adjusted, she realized how cold it was the penthouse. Like someone had set the air to arctic temperatures.

Like most werewolves, Leah liked a cool room but even her flesh goose-pimpled with the chill. She opened her mouth to call his name and saw a puff of white emerge as she breathed. Now that was unnecessarily cold, she thought. This couldn’t be on purpose, surely? Would he have turned off the climate control if he had left in a hurry? It wasn’t even that cold outside.

“Bran?” she called.

She walked along the plushly carpeted hall, emerging into the main living area. The drapes had been drawn all the away across the double height glass. She’d never seen the drapes drawn before. It made the space feel more intimate, preposterous given the size, and somehow more luxurious.

At the same time as she realized she didn’t _feel_ alone, a dark figure moved in the corner of her eye. Leah, who was no novice to the myriad Others in the world, remained still even though her fight or flight response, usually set to fight, wanted her to run and never stop running. 

She didn’t turn her head but tracked the figure as it moved, silently. The same height as Bran, the same physical size, she thought, trying to be rational. But he moved… not like Bran.

It came towards her and it _was_ Bran. She opened her mouth to say something when she realized that Bran’s eyes were no longer his lovely hazel but were an amber gold. The eyes of his wolf. She recognized them from full moon.

But, unlike full moon, there was nothing of Bran behind those eyes. This was just his wolf. His dominant, dangerous wolf with none of the civilizing elements of Bran’s mind.

Slowly, still fighting against her flight response, knowing it would be fatal if she gave into it, Leah lowered herself to the ground, trembling.

He came closer, utterly silently, as if his feet weren’t even touching the floor. It was magic that enabled him to walk through a crowd unnoticed. Magic that enabled him to force her Change painlessly. Talk to her mind to mind. And it was magic that made him silent now. _He was magic._

For the first time, Leah tasted the air and the witch in his blood. _Witch-born_ , a primal, fearful part of her whispered. _Witch-born wolf_.

Serena’s story about the Beserker came back to her. His mother had been a witch. A witch powerful enough to make werewolves.

Leah squeezed her eyes shut. A myth. It was a _myth_. Bran was just a man. Just a wolf. “Bad day?” she whispered, cowering before him. Tears leaked from her eyes. She was so frightened, her heart pounding so hard that it felt like it was in her mouth.

She couldn’t remember being this frightened before.

He came to crouch in front of her. She felt a chuff of hot air – his breath – on her temple. His face, she could feel the warmth of it in the coldness of the apartment, leaned close to her. Bran breathed her in deeply, scenting her, like a wolf did.

She felt the touch of curious fingers on her cheek and then, very gently, he tilted her head to the side to show her neck.

 _God, how had she forgotten?_ It had been so long since she’d had an Alpha, since the urge to submit and show her vulnerable neck to one to prove her submission. She hoped, she prayed, that the scent of him was still on her body. During the day, she sometimes got whiffs of it, particularly when she put her hair down. She had stopped being surprised by it, instead finding it comforting. If he could smell her on him, it might stop him…

What?

From killing her?

Outdoors, Leah was a fast runner. Faster than most werewolves, even in her human form. But here, in his apartment, there was nowhere to run, nowhere that he wouldn’t be able to catch her. There was probably a fire escape, with stairs that wound down all forty floors, but she had no idea where that was.

If she ran, he would kill her. He was a dominant wolf and she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of this before. Why had she never planned how to escape him? 

The wolf that was Bran pressed his mouth against her neck and she tensed, helplessly, awaiting the bite of his teeth that would end her life. But instead, with his mouth came the pressure of the rest of his body, pushing against her. She was eased back onto the carpet, her hands clenched at her sides, her body rigid.

They lay there, his face buried in her neck, his body heavy on top of hers. Minutes passed and nothing happened. Very tentatively, with a sense of extreme unreality, Leah moved her hand and touched his shoulder. When nothing happened, she smoothed the hand down his back. “Bran?” she whispered. Her voice croaked. “Are you there?”

He rumbled but made no noise that she could take for either denial or confirmation.

At least she wasn’t cold any more, she thought in an attempt to make the situation more positive. On top of her like this, his body was radiating heat in much the same way as it did when they were in bed together. It wasn’t even particularly uncomfortable. Her fear, perhaps foolishly, was waning.

She put her other arm around him until it felt like she was embracing him. She swallowed. Her mouth still felt dry as paper, coated in the sour taste of fear. She swallowed again. “I wonder what happened.”

There were few reasons _other_ than madness when the wolf would take over. Sometimes it was defensive. Leah’s own wolf had done it a couple of times to protect her and it wasn’t always physical protection, sometimes it was mental. If the wolf felt her mind would break, it would rise up, see or feel what Leah needed her to, absorb it and then sink back into her. There were parts of Leah’s history that were blank spots, ones she had no intention of ever probing.

“Did you get bad news?” she asked, proud that her voice was becoming calmer and clearer.

Bran rumbled again, a vibration that she felt in her own chest, pressed closely as they were. His head moved, his mouth on her neck nuzzling her. Though the movement made tiny prickles of fear appear at the base of her neck, gently she touched the pads of her fingertips against his skull, then stroked down with a very light touch. Human Bran liked that. Wolf Bran emitted a little noise that might have been a purr that tickled her inside. She did it again and he took a deep, very deep breath, and exhaled it. In doing so his body seemed to relax, as if he had been holding a great deal of tension. He got heavier.

“You’re going to sleep, aren’t you,” Leah whispered.

“You’re comfortable,” he said.

Relief cascaded through her. Her arms squeezed him reflexively. “You’re back!”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Bran murmured. He rubbed his cheek against her. “In a minute, I’m going to let go and I need you to leave.”

“I—” _Don’t want to_ , she finished mentally. It was the truth but she wasn’t foolish enough to argue with a more dominant werewolf in a state of distress. “What’s wrong?”

“I shall tell you another time. But, please, will you go? I couldn’t bear it if I hurt you.” His voice shook.

That he thought he could hurt her told her she had been in danger, just as much danger as she had thought. “You’ll be okay?” she asked.

“I shall try to be.” Carefully, Bran lifted himself up but remained, tensed on the points of his feet, knees and hands, raised above her. “Go. _Slowly_.”

Having no choice, Leah shimmied herself up, hesitating only when his face dipped down, nose brushing her abdomen where a sliver of her skin had been revealed. She felt the hot air of his breath again and then, very slightly, the scrape of his teeth. Her stomach muscles jumped. After a tense moment, he released her and lifted his head again. He kept his eyes lowered. “ _Go_ ,” he commanded, more sharply.

Leah knew better than to turn her back on him. She slid free, gazing at the top of his head, and on her hands and knees crawled backwards towards the elevator until her butt hit it. She reached behind for the button and nearly fell back when the doors immediately opened. “You’ll be okay?” she called, again, shuffling inside.

“Just _go_ , Leah,” he said and she heard the first crunch of bone as his wolf started to break free. He curled up as the doors closed on her. She heard him howl with the agony of an unplanned Change and unexpectedly her eyes filled with tears.

*

Leah spent the following two days in a state of painful anticipation. She kept her cell phone volume turned up as loud as she possibly could, just in case he called, or sent a message. Each time she came into her apartment, she searched the floor for a message. She took to going for ‘walks’ around the building, visited the swimming pool, the full moon suites, just in case she saw him.

But she didn’t.

She missed him. She was worried about him. She wanted, insane as this sounded, to see him, even if he was still in the thrall of his wolf, to make sure he was still alive.

That he hadn’t turned mad and would need to be killed, like Isabelle.

On the third day, on one of her trips she drove past a shop with familiar looking branding and recognized it from the box of the little French cookies Bran had shared with her, on the night of the failed meteor shower. His favorites, he’d said. Macarons.

Perhaps it was a silly whim but she stopped by the patisserie on her way home and arrived just as they were about to close, literally as the sign on the door was being flipped from ‘OPEN’ to ‘CLOSED’. The young, red-headed man doing so paused as she stood wide-eyed, a piece of glass between them. “Are you here to collect an order?”

“Oh – no. It’s just that I’d heard about the macarons and I thought I’d get some for a friend as he’s not feeling well. It’s okay. I can come back tomorrow.” It seemed more ridiculous now and she appeared to be babbling. She’d never return, she knew that. The moment was gone.

The young man smiled and opened the door. “You’re in luck, actually. I’ve a selection box left that someone didn’t collect. I thought you might be her.” He beckoned her inside. “Quick before someone sees.”

Leah followed him. It was a tiny place, with nothing more than a small covered counter, already cleared. There was a chalk board on the wall with a handwritten menu, some with lines through to suggest many had sold out.

He pulled a colorful bag from below the counter. “Box of twelve is usually thirty dollars but I’ll do you a deal for ten since they were going to be a write-off.”

Leah smiled, taking her wallet from her purse. Thirty dollars? For cookies? Even ten dollars was pretty steep. The rich were clearly very strange. “Done.”

She drove home with the little bag on her passenger seat beside her. She was feeling pretty pleased with herself. All she’d do, she figured, is go up in the elevator and not step out. Just assess the scene for signs of life. If the drapes were still drawn, she told herself, she’d put the little bag on the hall carpet and then leave.

Leah walked confidently to his elevator and it was only when her face was being scanned that it occurred to her that maybe he might have changed the permissions, given the situation. But it beeped, just as before, and the elevator doors opened.

She stood inside, as she had a few days ago, the little bag string held in her hands. She felt silly and vulnerable and nervous. She was literally walking into the mouth of the beast. But, she had to admit, she trusted him. That was the stupidest thing of all.

Swallowing, hard as the elevator came to a stop, her stomach quivering, Leah braced herself as the doors opened.

It was light. It was… temperate. But she received a different surprise. There was a stranger standing in the hallway. He had obviously heard the elevator and had come to see who it was.

“Who the heck are you?” the stranger asked.

After a moment of shock, she recognized him. There was a photograph on the mantelpiece in the library of two brothers, very different in looks and therefore born of separate mothers, but with Bran’s smile. His sons. This tall, Native American man was his youngest. “You’re Charles.”

He inclined his head, still frowning. “I am. How do you have access to this apartment?”

“I should think it would be obvious that he gave it to me. Is Bran all right?” She looked beyond him, wondering if Bran would be drawn by their conversation, by her voice even.

“He’s fine. Who _are_ you?”

Leah bit back the request to see Bran, unable to ask this man for anything, thinking that if Bran hadn’t mentioned her then he didn’t want his sons to know. She could understand that. He was a very private person.

Charles took a step towards her and she flattened herself against the back of the elevator in alarm. When he moved, he moved like a predator - a large, terrifying predator. He held none of his power back, not like Bran, and he was powerful. And, she sniffed, magical. Not witch, not quite.

What in the Sam Hill went on in this family?

Charles held open the door of the elevator and breathed in deeply. “I have smelled you all over this apartment. Is he courting you?”

Her eyes flared in panic. “He is very much _not_ doing that,” Leah said, firmly. They had agreed _no-strings_. She had to keep reminding herself of this or she was going to get very, very hurt.

The dark-haired man frowned further. Was his face set like that? Was he just permanently sullen? He made her very uncomfortable and not in a charming way like his father did. “What was your name again?”

“I don’t have to tell you that.” That was the joy of being a ‘lone’ wolf. She was answerable to no one. Leah lifted her chin, though she was by no means foolish enough to meet his eyes. “If you’ll _excuse_ me, I shall be leaving now. Please let Bran know that I called to see how he was doing,” she said regally.

Of course, that required him to let go of the doors, which he didn’t. They were at a standstill and she glared at his hand, pointedly. Surely Bran’s son would let her go? 

He sighed and released his hold on the door. “All right. I’ll tell him.”

“And… these are for him,” Leah said, shoving the bag at him before the door could close. “They’re his favorites.”

His frown wobbled with something that might have been the barest hint of his father’s smile. He pinched the bag between two fingers gingerly. “I will make sure he gets them.”

She nodded. She didn’t like him but he wasn’t lying, at least. She gave him the politest of her smiles. “Good.”

*

When she finally heard from Bran, it was mid-morning and Leah was on her break. She’d been waking up early, worrying about him as if he’d been in her life for years instead of only a few months and consequentially had done the early commuting shift each day. She’d had to vacuum her car _so many times_ because of all the children she had escorted to school.

At the sight of his name on her phone screen, Leah’s heart thump-thumped. “It’s you,” she said. Inanely.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not even pausing for the usual greetings. “I’m sorry I missed dinner. I’m sorry— about what happened. And my son. I don’t suppose we could meet today? So I could explain in person?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said hurriedly, looking at the time. “I could come by this afternoon? Four?”

“Four would be perfect.” Bran exhaled, as if he was relieved she had agreed.

She arrived at four on the dot. He took her into the library. She was beginning to think it was where he spent most of his time. Indeed, there was a crumpled blanket at one end of the couch which he whisked off and folded like he hadn’t wanted her to see that and there were several books on the rug in front of the fire.

He indicated that she should sit next to him on the couch, saying, “First, I think it’s time I told you a little bit about me.”

Leah nodded, eagerly.

“I’m tempted to start with ‘once upon a time’ because I know how this story sounds,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers, “but let’s try to bring the gory details to one short summation. There is a monster inside me, not like you might think there is a monster inside you but a true one. A beast who will kill mercilessly if I do not control him every hour, every second of the day. To control him, I have many techniques. I live a quiet life. I exercise. I reduce my interaction with violence. I gave up my pack—” Leah made a small noise and he smiled, touched the very edge of her knee. “I left it in the hands of my sons, jointly. An arrangement that works well enough with the occasional mediation from my side. But sometimes the beast rises to the surface unexpectedly.”

“Was that him? The other day?” Had she, for she was now sure it was he, met the Beserker of legend?

“It’s… not quite him but nearly,” Bran said, thoughtfully. “If it were truly the monster, you would not have been able to get as close as you did. Or perhaps you could have but you would not be sitting here now.”

She swallowed. “Do you know what happened? To trigger him?” 

Bran pressed his lips together until they were a thin, pale line. “I— yes. And that part of the story requires more than a summation. And you will not like it.”

Patiently, Leah folded her hands on her lap. “Try me.”

“When I came to the new world, I fell in love with a woman and I married her. With the mating bargain, I found that the beast was caged and controlled better than I could ever have hoped or dreamed. But she died and for a time I lost control of him, near disastrously. The loss of her was… it was as if the witch had asked me to kill my son again. I—”

Bran stopped and shook his head, seemed lost in thought, not realizing that he had revealed more detail of his history than he had intended. He continued, “I resolved never to love like that again. But the lure of that cage was great. I thought perhaps I could form an arrangement with a woman. Someone who would understand that I would never love them and be okay with that. Or,” he winced as if he could predict her reaction, and even agreed with it, “someone so unlovable that it would never be a problem.”

He was right. She did not like this story. “Unlovable? Bran,” Leah chided, imagining for one moment being perceived as that kind of woman. A very small voice in the back of her head, quickly dismissed, asked if perhaps that was what he was looking for with their ‘no strings’ agreement. But Leah had more confidence in herself than that. She was not unlovable. And she had agreed to no mating bargain. “That’s awful.”

“Yes. I was quite convinced it was possible, you know. I even looked for a couple of years. I had this vision— yes, I do know how this makes me sound.”

“Like an asshole?” she said hotly. It was the first time she had ever felt close to being angry with him.

Bran took this with remarkable equanimity. “In my defense, poor though it is, I grieved my first mate for a very long time. It colored my thinking. And I was truly afraid of what the monster would do without the support of the mating bargain. I felt like I was standing on a knife edge and everyone around me with it. It seemed the most practical of all the available options.”

“I presume,” Leah said crisply, still offended on behalf of every ‘unlovable’ woman out there, “you didn’t find anyone?”

He smiled at her. “I didn’t. So instead I found ways to cope. Isolation. This fortress. The loss of my pack. A quiet life. It works for the most part. But, as you said, there are triggers.” He touched her knee again, lightly, and lowered his voice. “For the past fifty years, my younger son Charles has been quietly ‘cleaning’ up our species before the humans could hear of it and put us under further and further restrictions. You should know it was Charles that killed Isabelle. And Leo. It was not a murder-suicide as it was reported. Leo had been committing atrocities in his wife’s name. What Charles found in that pack…” Bran shook his head. “In any case. There was an Omega. Is an Omega. A young woman. Charles brought her to me.”

Reeling with the details that Charles, his son, was exacting werewolf justice in the dark, Leah almost didn’t get what he meant. “Brought her… oh.” Leah’s heart sank.

“Mmm. Like a sacrificial lamb, my son presented her to me as a solution to my problem. An Omega would be able to quiet my beast, he thought. He’d prepped the girl to make this great sacrifice on behalf of our people and she was terrified, coming from the background she had. Worse still, it became quite apparent to me that he is in love with her himself and he couldn’t see it. I was angry. More than angry. And so was the beast. I expelled them both and tried to fight it but he gained more ground. Of course I completely forgot I had given you access to the apartment. The shock of seeing you, Leah. My God.” He covered his face with his hands.

“You missed dinner. I thought something bad had happened,” she muttered, not going to apologize for seeking him out when she didn’t have the full context. Her mind was swimming, almost overwhelmed with thoughts. The Beserker. Charles. Isabelle. The unlovable woman he had never found.

She tried a smile. It was a little wobbly. She tried to make light of it all. “No wonder you don’t tell me things.”

Bran dragged his hands down his face, pulling at his skin and gave her a wry smile. “I don’t intend to withhold things from you. It just doesn’t make for light conversation.”

For the third time, Bran touched her knee. But this time he left his hand there. “I must have frightened you, badly, but you came back.” He smiled. “Brought me macarons.”

“I – it was a ‘get well soon’ present,” Leah said, sheepishly. It seemed remarkably trivial now. Given the situation, she rather thought she should have bought more. Possibly an entire shop’s worth of macarons. And arrived in a stab vest, armed to the teeth. But she had given up all her weapons when she left her pack. “I met Charles. He was very cross.”

“Yes, he rather put two and two together. Oddly, given not two days before that he had brought me a woman, he took your appearance rather badly.” This seemed to amuse Bran. 

“Oh. Am I the first…? Since. Um.” Since the woman whom he had apparently loved so much he lost his mind.

“Not quite.” He lifted his brows. “That would be impressive of me, wouldn’t it? But you are the first, let’s say, prolonged presence.”

“Prolonged presence.” Despite herself, she smiled, lowering her head so he couldn’t see the full force of it. Ridiculous, she was ridiculous. The man was a monster and she was, still, apparently, desperately attached to him. What was wrong with her? “I knew you were too perfect,” Leah told him, sternly.

Bran laughed out loud and then fell back against the back of the couch. This time when he covered his face it was to try to contain himself. She had never seen him laugh in such an unrestrained way before. She had really tickled him. “Perfect? Is that what you think?”

“I _did._ It’s almost a relief, to be honest.”

His eyes were shining. “You’re teasing me.”

Leah shook her head. “No, really, the charming and thoughtful and amazing in bed shtick was really freaking me out. No werewolf man is like that. There’s always a catch.” She stood up briskly. “I can smell that you’ve ground some fresh coffee beans. Come and show me again how to use your complicated machine.”

“Leah,” he said, and though his voice held the echo of his amusement before, he caught her hand and looked up at her seriously. “It behooves me to give you an out. I would understand.”

“Point for behooves,” she said. “But I don’t want an out.”

Bran exhaled and stood, not letting go of her hand. “Are you absolutely sure?”

She nodded. She was. “I’m sure.” Then, because the moment deserved it, she leaned forward to kiss him, keeping her eyes wide open.

*

Serena called the following Thursday. “All the Washington Alphas and their seconds are in town and Angus has suggested everyone heads to Wolf Towers for Friday’s mixer. You should come.”

As the thought of _more_ Alphas in one location wasn’t remotely appealing, Leah started to decline. She had already had plans with Bran and had taken the following day off, as well. She didn’t know if it was accident or by Bran’s design, but they had been keeping things quite low-key since his monster had made an appearance and hadn’t spent a night together. The most they had done was neck on her couch after she had finally cooked dinner for him. She wasn’t sure if Bran thought sex would be triggering but she had decided to let him go at his own pace and not push things.

Then she remembered that, though it had been a while ago, Bran had said they could go to a mixer together. Maybe they could have a couple of drinks before heading up to his apartment? He had said Angus was a friend.

She put the suggestion to him on the phone that evening, having told Serena she would think about it, and he surprised her by only hesitating briefly before agreeing.

“Angus also called me to see if I was in town. I suppose an hour or so wouldn’t hurt.” Bran sighed, though, as if he really didn’t want to. “Shall I come and pick you up at six?”

Leah leaned on the door of her refrigerator as she contemplated its uninteresting contents, her cell propped on her counter. “I could meet you there.”

“No, if you don’t mind, I would like to pick you up.”

“Like a date?” 

“Yes. Like a date.” Again, he sighed. “Which, hopefully, every man there will appreciate.”

“Ah,” Leah said. Apparently even Bran was not immune to the sexual politics of the werewolf kingdom. She closed the refrigerator door and leaned on the counter, next to his voice.

“Ah, indeed.”

Leah supposed they were at a stage now where she could ask honest questions. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what are the parameters of your…” She twisted her face, trying to think of a nice way to put it that wasn’t ‘exactly how possessive will you get about our currently undefined relationship?’, “… tolerance?”

Bran ‘hmm’ed. “I don’t actually know. It’s not something I have really experienced. I’m sure I’ll be fine. Do you get jealous?” he asked, clearly having decided she had opened the door to allow him to ask the question of her as well.

“If you start flirting with another female in front of me, I would be pretty ticked,” Leah said, truthfully.

Even in the past, if the man she was sleeping with struck up a clearly flirtatious conversation with another woman it would have made her furious. She wasn’t even certain this was a werewolf thing and was perhaps just a personality trait. 

“I obviously won’t do that.” There was a rustling noise. A newspaper, she thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she had read a newspaper. They were usually filled with depressing news.

She thought of what Serena had said. “Do you know why the Washington Alphas are in town?” It was unusual for Alphas to meet on a state by state basis. Her old Alpha had rarely met with his own peers but then he had been an ornery bastard.

“Yes. The WAS is next week. They’re agreeing on the discussion points Angus will take forward for their state.”

The WAS was the Werewolf Annual Assembly, which took place in an undisclosed location that, without question, always got leaked a couple of days before. It had been held in Denver one year, the city nearest to her old pack, and had caused absolute chaos. Not just in terms of fifty Alphas, plus their mates, seconds and thirds descending on the city but because of the inevitable violence. There were usually anti-werewolf protests. The Denver assembly had been firebombed.

Leah decided to change the subject. “How was your day?” she asked.

“Actually fine. I feel… fine.”

“That’s good.”

“And you? How was work?”

“Dull. Lots of short trips,” she said, currently her pet peeve as she made less money on them. “Oh, and a guy who stank more than humans usually stink. I had to air out the car. Oh, and two teenage girls who talked _incessantly_ about sex, as in _incredibly_ graphically. I was shocked.” She went to open the refrigerator. She took out an onion and a block of cheese. She had a can of tomatoes and some garlic in the cupboard. It would have to be pasta. Again.

“Shocked that they know or _how much_ they know?” Bran asked. She could hear him smiling. She liked that she could hear him smiling. In the background, she heard a noise. “Oh, I have to go. I’m getting a phone call on my landline.”

“All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“At six.” He paused. “I promise.”

*

Since she had changed her shift to attend the mixer, and to have the night off, Leah finished work at five and only had time to shower quickly and change before Bran came to pick her up.

Bran smiled appreciatively when she opened the door to him. “You look wonderful,” he said, kissing her hello.

She hadn’t varied the outfit particularly from the previous mixer, having a very limited selection of ‘smart’ clothes. This time she wore a pale lavender sweater with a low V-neck. It had required a certain type of bra and was a touch more revealing than she normally went for. She felt validated, however, when his eyes lingered on her cleavage.

“Let me just put my shoes on,” Leah said, beckoning him inside.

Without hesitation, Bran followed her into the bedroom. He was watching her with something of a predatory gleam. Sex was definitely back on the menu, Leah decided, feeling herself respond in kind as she looked at him.

Instead of his ripped jeans, Bran was wearing a pair of dark grey pants, a leather belt, and a green button-down tucked in at the waist. It was probably the smartest outfit she had ever seen him wear.

It made him look older and if it weren’t for the fact that Selena and Angus were expecting them respectively, she would have suggested they skip the occasion entirely. “You look very handsome,” she told him genuinely, thinking she would enjoy unwrapping him later. Bran smiled as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.

She pushed her feet into the heels she had worn the last time. “Right, ready,” she announced, grabbing her purse from her dresser.

“Wait,” Bran said, catching her hand and tugging her towards him. He kissed her, lingeringly. He tasted minty. She sighed into him and his hands roamed over her back, down to her butt, pulling her tight against him so their hips kissed as well.

When they separated at a natural point, Leah saw her own dilated pupils in the reflection in his eyes. “One hour,” she said, licking her lips, really very close to rubbing herself against him like an animal in heat. Which she was _not_.

“One hour,” he agreed, squeezing her butt and giving her one last affectionate kiss.

They walked into the dark bar a respectable distance between them. With one finger touching her lower spine briefly, Bran nodded to the window, where a group of men were clustered. “Angus is over there. Do you want to be introduced?”

Leah assessed the scene and decided against it. There was a lot of testosterone over there. “If you can separate him from the herd, maybe. You go over. I’ll talk to Serena.” Serena was as Leah had left her last time, with the trio of men from before whose names Leah now couldn’t quite remember. Yacob? And… hmm.

Bran glanced over, nodded, and then left her, picking up a glass of champagne from the table. She noted he too had avoided the werewolf version. She chose to do the same.

Serena stepped away from the trio of men and gave Leah a look up and down. “Very nice,” she said, lips twitching as she glanced at Leah’s cleavage.

“Nothing on yours,” Leah said bluntly, taking a sip of her champagne. Serena’s bosom was practically at her chin tonight. Leah had always considered herself to be boringly heterosexual but even she was distracted by this impressive statement. Her hair, for Serena, was relatively tame and might actually be her natural hair, a very light blonde. Leah peered at the hairline as if she could discern a difference. 

“Did my eyes deceive me or did you walk in with the Beast of Wolf Towers?” Serena asked, gleefully.

Leah cringed. “What an awful name. Don’t repeat that in front of me again,” she said, firmly. “But I accompanied Bran Cornick here, if that’s what you’re asking.”

A little chastened, Serena nonetheless persevered. “Do you _know_ him?”

“Yes,” she said, shortly, as she looked around. It was busier than the previous time. As well as the group of men Bran had joined, there were several at the bar, along with a few women. The trio of men whose names she had forgotten occupied the same space and then there were several smaller tables occupied by couples. The music was a little louder, too.

One of the men – the one who owned his own security firm and had the nice smile – came over. “Leah, how lovely to see you again,” he said, flashing his teeth at her in a wider smile and, to her surprise, leaning forward to brush his cheek against hers in greeting, the werewolf version of air kissing. She didn’t think they were _that_ friendly. “How have you been?”

Her cheek tingling, and wanting to scrub it with her hand, she frowned at him. “Just fine, thank you.” She sought for a topic that was neutral and not overly friendly. “Will you be attending the WAS next week?”

He was Angus’s second, she remembered that much. No idea what his name was, of course. She started to go through the alphabet, hoping it would trigger something.

He seemed pleased, perhaps because she had remembered a pertinent detail about him. “I will, yes. It should be interesting.”

“How far in advance do they tell you where it is, _Daniel?_ ” Serena asked, smiling but casting Leah an extremely knowing look, as if she knew Leah hadn’t a clue.

“Still don’t know,” Daniel said, oddly not looking at Serena as he answered. “Usually they only give you twelve hours notice. Long enough to head for an airport and board the first plane you can get.”

“That’s pretty short notice,” Leah said, surprised that even the werewolf attendees were kept in the dark. She had always assumed that the ‘leak’ came from outside and not from one of their own people. “I presume everything is organized for you? Flights and hotels?”

“No. We have to book our own flights and find a hotel because if they did a block-booking it would basically notify everyone. It’s absolutely insane.” He tipped back his glass and finished his drink. He looked at her half finished glass. “Not braved our champagne yet?”

“Our?”

“Yulia’s family produces it,” Serena clarified, with similar levels of pride that she could see on Daniel’s face. “It’s the first of its kind. At the moment, it’s small batch distribution but we’ve plans to expand next year.”

“Really? How enterprising. What’s in it?”

The two exchanged a look and then Serena’s eyes hurriedly dropped to the floor. Daniel reached behind to the table and plucked a glass. “Smell it and tell me what you think.”

Their fingers brushed as he handed it to her. She sniffed the glass. “It’s not… oh.” Leah lifted it to the lights that ran behind the back of the bar and peered into it. “Is there _silver_ in here?”

They both grinned.

“Why… it’s poisonous?” Leah sniffed it again, was tempted to stick her tongue in it but that wasn’t something a lady did in public, even if she was a werewolf. “That makes _no_ sense.”

“The alcohol goes into your blood faster,” Serena explained eagerly, “which means you get more of a kick and for longer. It’s also got a higher alcohol content.”

“That sounds insane. What if you drank a lot of it?” Werewolves were not known for their restraint.

“Then you’d probably be violently sick and the silver would leave your body. In these quantities, it really has very little effect,” Serena said confidently, tipping some more back herself.

Leah looked into the glass again. _Willingly_ absorbing silver seemed, she’d say it again, absolutely insane. “Is it popular?” she asked dubiously, handing the glass back to Daniel, with no intention of trying it herself.

Daniel looked puffed up with pride, one corner of his mouth lifted. “Extremely.”

“What if a human drank it?”

He shrugged, as if this question was irrelevant. “It’s harmless for humans.”

“Huh. Could you just add silver to anything?” she wondered.

“That’s a very a good question, Leah. We’re actually in the process of a premium line of spirits catering to the niche werewolf market,” Daniel said. Despite the pompous tone, Leah thought she detected a real interest in the subject, more than the personal pride of his pack producing something successful. She wondered if he was involved in that business as well as his own security firm.

“Astonishing. And congratulations.”

Serena picked up the half-empty bottle on the table and waggled it at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to try a glass?”

“I’m sure.”

“Not curious at all?”

Leah was but she wasn’t about to try something new in her current company. Maybe if she was home alone. “Perhaps another time.”

Serena shrugged and topped her glass and then Daniel’s. Once again, he barely looked at her, instead put his full glass down and fetched the non-werewolf-champagne bottle and topped up Leah’s glass, touching her arm with his other hand as if to steady himself.

Hmm, she thought. 

“I believe your old Alpha will be at the WAS,” Daniel said, meeting her eyes. His hand dropped away from her arm, leaving behind a warm imprint. “Would you like me to pass on a message?”

Leah could think of few things she’d like less. “Thank you. No, he and I have exchanged our last words,” she said, sipping her drink.

“Oh, you made it sound as if you separated on good times,” Serena said, sounding – and looking - almost saddened by the prospect of the end of Leah’s relationship with a man who had been both strict father and dictator to her for most of her life.

“And those terms were that we would never speak to each other ever again,” she said, intending to make them both laugh, which worked. Daniel, she felt, laughed a little harder than absolutely necessary.

“I could imagine emancipation might strike some of the older generations as rather challenging,” he mused.

That was one way of putting it. “Would your Alpha tolerate it?”

Daniel glanced at Serena briefly, then, and looked away. “He… tries to be open minded,” he said.

There seemed to be an awkward pause and Leah sensed it had something to do with Serena and Daniel themselves. She wondered if they were courting. They demonstrated none of the normal signs however. Perhaps they had simply been in a sexual relationship. If anything, she was getting the feeling that Daniel was interested in Leah, which was something she would probably have deal with soon. 

Yacob came over, slapped a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “I’m off,” he announced. He smiled at Leah, not a smile with intent but a genuine, warm greeting. “Leah, it’s good to see you again. Sorry I can’t stay. I have—”

“A date. Yes, we get it,” Serena interrupted, rolling her eyes.

Yacob was unrepentant and strolled off with quite a swagger in his step, giving the group a small salute as a goodbye. Aarush joined them then, shaking his head. “For all our sakes, I hope that goes well.”

Leah was going to ask more details on what was clearly a running joke when Serena and Daniel suddenly stood to attention. “Uh-oh,” Serena said under her breath.

Half turning, she saw that Bran and another man were approaching. She assumed the other man was their Alpha.

Once again, Bran touched her back with one finger in a way that probably wasn’t visible to anyone else. “Leah, I’d like to introduce you to Angus, the Alpha of the Emerald City pack. Angus, this is Leah. Leah has recently moved into Wolf Towers.”

Angus was a handsome, spry man with sandy hair, a shade or two lighter than Bran’s. He nodded to her deferentially. “Yulia mentioned you. I hope my son is keeping you entertained. And Serena, of course,” he added, as an afterthought. He smiled at Serena in a good-natured way.

Leah’s own smile was tense. “I didn’t realize Daniel was your son.” Great. Not only the second of the Alpha pack but also the offspring of the Alpha. No doubt much-cherished offspring.

“No, he likes to keep that quiet,” was his father’s dry response. He exchanged a brief, knowing looking with Bran – also the father of sons. 

“That reminds me,” Serena chipped in, with an obviously over-bright tone. “Yulia asked if you would like to join us for full moon, Leah. You would be more than welcome.”

Leah was getting the slightest inkling that she was being set up in some way. She narrowed her eyes at Serena, who gazed back at her with false innocence.

She pieced together several thoughts. Yulia’s odd interest in her, a mere lone wolf. Serena’s _orders_ to introduce her around. The strange pressure to attend this particular social function. Daniel’s just slightly too over-familiar ways. He was even watching her now over the rim of his champagne glass. Like prey.

Bran was no help. “It’s an interesting experience,” he said to her mildly, leaving it entirely up to her.

She had realized as he did so that she had been expecting, no, _wanting_ , to spend full moon with him again. Every full moon.

Oh, _damn_ , she thought.

“Do thank her for thinking of me,” Leah managed with a wide smile. “I’ll certainly think about it and let you know in good time.”

Bran put his hand on her back, this time not the discrete brush of a finger, but his palm, flat. He left it there. “If you’ll excuse us, we have plans for the rest of this evening,” he said, politely.

Immensely relieved, Leah put her glass down. “Serena, if you’re free next week, I’d love to have lunch.” She aimed a slightly shark-toothed smile at the other woman. One that said, clearly, that Serena owed her. Leah felt she had been _very_ accommodating.

Serena nodded. “Oh. Oh, yes, of course. Lovely. I’ll let you know when I’m free.”

“Fantastic. Gentlemen,” she said, sweepingly.

Bran left his hand on her all the way to the elevator, used it to lightly maneuver her inside, then he dropped it. “You can just say no to their full moon extravaganza.”

Leah scowled at the closed doors. She was annoyed. “I plan to.”

“Should I have said you were spending it with me? I wasn’t sure if I would be overstepping,” he said thoughtfully. “We’d not discussed it so I didn’t want to assume.”

As usual, he addressed the heart of the matter quickly. Leah’s annoyance deflated. “Part of me would have enjoyed it but you were right not to. It’s my issue to address. I shall speak to Serena and see exactly what it is that is going on. She obviously knows.”

“It seems clear Yulia is trying to arrange something between you and her son. Who seems receptive.”

“Yes, but why would she? He’s the Alpha’s son. A second in the pack. I am—” Leah tried to find a way to say ‘no one’ without implying she felt cut-up about that. In the end, she just gestured to herself wordlessly.

The doors opened and she stepped out and immediately took off her heels, leaving them by the side table in the entrance hall. She walked down the hall to the kitchen, Bran following her.

“I would imagine you are unaware that when you were emancipated, there was a great deal of chatter amongst the werewolf community.”

“Oh?” Leah asked, feeling a spike of nervousness. She wanted to do something with her hands. She pointed to the shiny machine on his counter. “I’m going to make coffee. Would you like one?”

“If you’re making, yes.” Bran hopped up on the counter to watch her. On the way down the hall, he had also kicked off his shoes and untucked his shirt – instantly transforming himself back to his usual, somehow collegiate appearance. 

She chewed her bottom lip in concentration as she ground the beans and carefully squished coffee into the portafilter. “So, what were they saying about me?”

“That you were an irreplaceable asset. That Davy had done everything in his power to keep you. That the pack suffered when you left.”

Leah’s lip curled. “Nonsense.”

“Which part?”

“The suffering part.” She smirked. “The rest is true.” Unfortunately.

Bran smiled at her, the way he did when she said things that others wouldn’t. “I’ll admit, what I remember of Davy wouldn’t suggest he would bow to anyone. What tricks did he try to stop you from leaving?”

Thankfully, the noise of the water going through the coffee was loud enough to give Leah a moment to pause and think before she had to answer. Sometimes she spoke before she thought and Bran was, though he hid it, a powerful man.

Bran was also a gentleman. He would not like what Davy had done, or tried to do. But, as with many things in a werewolf’s long life, it was in the past. There was nothing anyone could do now and Bran’s anger would not help anyone, even if she would personally feel vindicated.

“He promoted me,” Leah said eventually, when the machine was quiet again. “To give me the autonomy I was looking for. He destabilized the pack in doing so. I was not dominant enough. It was a mess. In the end, he had more or less forced me out himself.”

Bran absorbed what she said, his eyes on her face, as if he could glean more from her expression. He touched the end of her braid, thoughtfully. “You sound sad.”

She _was_ sad. She rarely reflected on that because the freedom she now had far outweighed it. “It was a sad end. It was my home. They were my home. For a long time. If he had just let me go when I asked—” God, she was still _so angry_ with Davy. “He just went too far.”

“It sounds as if he really didn’t want to let you go.”

“I had been with him the longest,” she sighed. That was true. The other things… he was a man. John Davy had, in the end, been just a man. A dominant, Alpha _man_.

Leah handed Bran his coffee. “If you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

“Very well.” Bran jumped off the counter without spilling a drop from his cup. “I was thinking of ordering pizza, putting a movie on and fooling around with you on the couch for the rest of the evening. How does that sound?”

Leah smiled widely. “That sounds perfect.”

*

After applying only a little pressure, she met Serena for lunch on Tuesday and spent the rest of the afternoon in an annoyed haze, so much so that she finished work and simply went straight to see Bran without any prior arrangement.

If he was surprised to see her, or displeased that she had not called ahead, he didn’t show it. 

She paused midway through kissing him, her hands on the sides of his face. Why did his place smell like… “Coyote?” she asked, identifying a scent not particularly common to the city and certainly not at the top of a forty-floor building.

“You have a good nose. My daughter-in-law,” Bran said, his mouth a little pinched.

Leah lifted her eyebrows. What, was she a coyote wrangler?

Bran took pity on her confusion. “She is a Walker. She can change into a coyote.” He nudged her in the direction of his library, running his hand down her back to rest where her sweater touched her jeans, the tip of his index finger rubbing her bare skin.

She blinked. “I’ve never… oh, no, I have heard of such a thing,” she said as a memory unfolded. A long time ago. “I thought the vampires killed them all.”

“Most. But she’s young. Very young.” He sighed again, as if her youth was a personal trial to him. She often felt that way. She _had_ felt that way at lunch today. 

Leah dropped down onto his couch, carefully maintaining the integrity of a selection of books that were piled on one cushion. His library always had an air of organized chaos, as if everything was in precisely the place it ought to be, even if that place happened to be not on a logical surface. “Which son is she married to?”

Bran picked the books up, set them aside, then sat down next to her, putting his arm around the back of the couch, fingers touching her shoulder. “Samuel. My eldest.”

From the nuances of his response, Leah took a leap. “Is their marriage in difficulties?”

“It’s had its challenges.” Bran made an attempt to summarize where these difficulties might stem from. “She was sixteen when they eloped. And Samuel is nearly as old as I.”

“Ah,” Leah said. That was a very large age difference, given she thought Bran was at least three times, if not – astonishing thought though this was - four times as old as she. Perhaps even older.

“Yes. ‘Ah’. I would have preferred… well. For her to have experienced a little of life before she settled down to becoming his mate and mother to his children. They have three. With varying degrees of their mother’s magic, though none can change like her.”

“Three children. My goodness.” Leah felt a pang of envy. Envy of the ability, if not the role of motherhood which she had never been certain she would be much suited for.

“Fourth is on the way, I found out today.”

 _Four_. She knew her eyes were wide. “Is… because she’s a Walker…?” She seemed unable to clarify her question. Werewolf fertility was very poor. Well, _female_ werewolf fertility was non-existent. Men could have children with human women but even then it was fifty-percent harder.

“Sam always believed that would be the case. That as wolves and coyotes could breed, the same would be the case for them.”

Leah felt her lip curl. “He mated with her because she could have his children.” 

“He loves her. He does,” Bran said, as if he was reinforcing this message to himself. “And she loves him.” He shook himself. “Come, this is depressing conversation. Tell me. You had lunch with Serena today.”

“I did. I found out more than I would perhaps have liked to about the machinations of the Emerald City pack.”

“This sounds perilously like gossip.” Bran grinned.

“Oh, it is. Apparently young Daniel Hopper—”

“How young is he?”

“Not that young, I suppose. He was Changed during the Civil War. _Apparently_ ,” she continued, “he is quite the ladies man and has slept with all of the women in his father’s pack, some of whom were otherwise involved. The implication I was given was that these women, and their husbands, felt that given his position they were unable to refuse.”

“That’s unpleasant.”

An understatement. “This, seemingly went on unchecked for some time until Angus’s second left to start his own pack and Daniel, who had been apparently enjoying lazing around somewhere fourth in the pack, challenged Yacob for the role and won. But Angus put a proviso on it, saying that he could only be second if he stopped sleeping around and found himself a mate. He was given five years to do so.”

The frown that had formed on Bran’s face cleared briefly before returning. “Ah. Let me guess. Prince Charming’s five years are nearly up?”

She held up four fingers of her right hand. “Four months and counting.”

“This is— I don’t know what to say. Unpleasant. Archaic. Faintly amusing. Insulting.”

Yes, that was it, she had been _insulted_ for much of the afternoon. Annoyed and insulted. Yulia had wanted to dangle her offspring in front of Leah in order to solve a problem. Not because she was such a catch, as Bran had so charmingly implied. “Even better, I’m reasonably certain Serena is in love with him _and_ from the smell of her today I think they are still sleeping together.”

“Oh God.” Bran didn’t normally take the Lord’s name in vain.

Now that she had passed this information on, Leah found humor in the situation. “It does sound like a wonderful plot for a romantic novel, doesn’t it? Or a screenplay.” She gave in to the impulse and cuddled into his side. “I’ll bet it would be a smash hit.”

“Maybe you should write it.”

She chuckled and rubbed her cheek against his T-shirt, listening to the reassuring sound of his heartbeat. “Did I interrupt your day?”

Bran tucked his arm around her. “In the most pleasant of ways, I assure you. I am on round, hmm, twenty of edits with Tag.” He waved to his desk where there was indeed a large stack of paper. “I would say the length of the book has increased twenty-percent.”

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

He nodded. “He’s out of control. I need to reign him in but he’s enjoying himself.”

It sounded as if Bran was, too. “You’re a good friend.”

“Very few would say so.” He rested his chin on the top of her head. “Will you stay tonight? Tomorrow afternoon, I have to go away for a few days.”

The was the first she was hearing of it. She felt a flicker of irritation that he hadn’t thought to mention this. “Are you attending the WAS? When will you be back?” she asked.

“Yes. Saturday, I hope.”

“How come you’re attending? I thought only Alphas and their seconds attended. I didn’t think you were Alpha of your pack any more.”

“I’m not. It’s a sort of a consultancy thing.”

That sounded… odd. She pulled back from him so she could look him in the eye. “Consultancy?”

“Yes. Truthfully I was rather hoping they would forget to invite me.” He stroked her hair. “I’d like it if you… stayed here whilst I am away. I would enjoy thinking of you in my bed whilst I’m being ritually punished in what is no doubt a windowless underground bunker somewhere in the Mid-West.”

Leah was charmed but admittedly a little perplexed. “You would? Bran, who _are_ you?”

He understood this was less of a literal question. “I have a great deal of experience that members of our species seem to think is worth listening to, that’s really it.”

“And you can talk mind to mind. With all werewolves? Not just ones you’ve slept with,” she added, darkly, hoping if that was the case it was a small group. She thought of what he had asked her the other day, that if suddenly she was introduced to a woman he had been with, she might well be moved to jealous violence.

Bran leaned forward, kissed her, smiling as he did it. “Has anyone ever told you that your face conveys your thoughts and feelings almost better than your words?”

“Yes, very frequently. I’m grateful my passengers mostly see the back of my head.” His hand roamed down her side and then up, thumb curving around her breast. She grabbed hold of his wrist and put another on his shoulder, holding him off of her as he started to inevitably lower her down onto the couch. “And don’t distract me.”

“I just thought this conversation might be more enjoyable if we were lying down.”

“Oh, really, Bran,” she muttered, even as she wriggled to accommodate him. This couch wasn’t really big enough. She had to bend her knees and he slid his leg between her thighs.

“It’s, and I would ask that you keep this to yourself,” he said in her ear, “with any werewolf that I know.”

“Any? Any _where_?” she added, wriggling as his words tickled her neck.

“As always you ask the pertinent question. I believe so though, obviously, I demonstrate this particular skill with a select few.” He nuzzled the side of her neck which tickled her in a different way.

She closed her eyes, imagining the kind of mental powers that would allow a werewolf to communicate with _any_ werewolf, anywhere in the world. “How is that possible?” she whispered.

“I suspect a series of coincidences. My parentage. The manner in which I was changed. Him.” Bran paused to touch his chest, which she took to mean the monster inside.

She pressed her hand over his, as if the monster really was underneath. “I guess it’s… useful?”

“ _More_ useful if I could hear what people say in return,” he said wryly, kissing her. “Will you stay? Whilst I’m gone?”

“Maybe a night or two. It might be weird, without you,” she said, thinking of his big bed, the big apartment, all the empty rooms. The couch creaked as she put one leg around him, drawing him between her legs. He pushed against her. “I’d feel like I was an intruder.”

Bran’s hand slid up her top. “You wouldn’t be.” They both jerked as his phone started ringing. He dropped his head to her shoulder. “Ugh.”

She patted his back sympathetically. “You get that. I’m going to go get my overnight things.”

*

It was, as she thought, weird being alone in Bran’s apartment. The first night, she put the TV on _and_ the radio in the kitchen and then spent the last hour before bed trying to work out how to turn off the lights which seemed to come on automatically but then simply stayed on. Eventually she messaged him and he called, whispering from what sounded like a stairwell, that they were automatic and would turn off at midnight.

“Is everything okay?” she whispered back. She knew now that he was in in Fort Worth as the newspapers and the TV stations had been full of it, including a fight that had broken out in a bar between two Alphas who surely knew better and the usual gathering crowd of humans waving placards. The exact location hadn’t been leaked yet but it was only a matter of time.

“It’s fine, I miss you, but I have to go.” He hung up abruptly.

The second night, she did better, but had a strange stream and she woke early. She rolled around in Bran’s bed for a while, cuddling the pillow that smelled most of him until she felt just too pathetic and got up to start her day.

Since Bran’s kitchen inspired her to spread her domestic wings, she cooked herself a good breakfast, putting the television on in the living area to the news channel. There was little update on the WAS as, for once, the location had been kept secret well into the second day. Good news.

She took her coffee up to the roof, looking at the view rather than just appreciating the greenery and pretending she wasn’t in a city. Her cell phone rang and when she saw it was Bran, her first response was to smile. She answered. “Morning,” she said, happily.

“Morning. Where are you? On the roof?”

Just hearing his voice made her wriggle with contentment. “I am indeed. I’m on that little wooden bench in the corner. Where are you?”

“That’s a nice spot,” he sighed. “I’m outside a 7-11, eating a hotdog that may once have _seen_ a pig but otherwise bears no resemblance to one.” 

“Tell me that’s not breakfast.”

“Ah, but it is, more’s the pity.”

Leah pulled a face. “This sounds hideous, Bran.” Two more days until he could come home. She was surprised at how much she missed him. She supposed they spent more time together than not these days but, still, it was a comparatively short space of time to get used to a person’s presence in your life. “I made your chicken cacciatore last night. It didn’t taste as good as yours but it was all right.” She was being self-depreciating. It had probably been the most delicious thing she had ever cooked for herself. She ate half of it standing up over the pan. “I’m having it for my lunch.”

“I like the thought of you cooking in my kitchen.”

“I like cooking your kitchen,” she replied. She put down her coffee and sighed. “Is there anything you can tell me about the WAS?”

“Not really. My sons appear to not be speaking, which is tedious.”

“Do you know why?”

“Does it make me a bad parent that I don’t and I don’t particularly care?”

She giggled. “That’s not true.”

Bran grumbled. “I wish it was. They have very different leadership styles and I believe they are clashing on that front. We had some trouble, recently, and the repercussions are still being felt. They’ll have to get over it.”

Leah noted the ‘we’ and filed it away. “What’s happening with the Omega?”

“She’s staying with the Moor.”

“The Moor?” Even though she was forty floors up, alone, and presumably many hundreds, hopefully _thousands_ of miles away, she lowered her voice. “The _Moor_ is in your pack? Is in _America?”_

“Oh. Yes.”

She could not have been more shocked. “I am… considering moving to Europe. Death sentence be damned.”

“He’s not so bad. Any more,” Bran added.

“Any more,” she repeated, rolling her eyes. “And they’ve left this girl with him?”

“His mate was an Omega. It seemed the most logical solution. She was untrained.”

“And Charles? How does he feel about this?”

“His wolf is deeply unhappy. _Charles_ is militant that he is fine.”

“Your family life is far more dramatic than I expected given your so-called reputation as a cross between Bruce Wayne and a hoarder,” she mused.

“I know, isn’t it disappointing? I have to go, soon, or I’ll be late. Leah,” he said, his tone changing. “Word has got out that you are living in Wolf Towers. Boyd has made a fuss about your inheriting the only asset of Isabelle’s that was worth anything. You have no worries on that front, it’s all legal and above-board, but is this going to be a problem for you?”

Leah exhaled, trying to keep it calm and quiet. Did she think Davy would try to track her down? Maybe not. He was too proud for that. But did she think his _mate_ would? Probably. “Perhaps.”

“Mention it to Concierge. They’ll notify security.”

She nodded. “Tedious,” she muttered.

*

Leah woke the following morning after another bad dream and grumpily showered in Bran’s huge walk-in shower, barely cheered by using his nearly unscented products that meant she would smell like him all day. She combed out her hair and put the news on, froze with her finger on the control. The WAS was top story. There had been another fight. Oh, how the humans loved a werewolf-on-werewolf fight.

The only evidence the humans had, however, was a photograph taken at night and Leah sucked in a shocked breath. Even in the dark, poor quality photograph, John Davy was clear as day but the blur that was Bran would only be recognizable by those who knew him well. And knew, too, the precise amber-gold color of his wolf’s eyes.

Dropping the remote, Leah grabbed her cell to call Bran several times. He didn’t answer.

When that didn’t work, she ran into his library and rifled through his desk, trying to find a contact book, _any_ mention of his sons’ cell phone numbers. Eventually, she tried the speed dial numbers on his landline. There were five and each one just rang continuously.

She sat in his chair, her breathing fast and harsh in the silence. He wasn’t dead, she told herself. If anyone was going to be dead… it was John Davy.

It would be a huge overreaction to fly to Fort Worth, she thought, even as she opened his laptop and started to search for flights. She had missed the last non-stop flight. The next one would be at 5.30am. She looked at some connecting flights, seeing if anything would get her there sooner. 

Her cell rang. Bran’s name flashed on the screen. She felt sick with relief. “Bran?” she demanded. “Are you all right?”

“It’s… Samuel,” came a deep, unfamiliar voice.

She stood, dread filling her, overfilling her, ready to spill. “Oh god, is he hurt? Is it the wolf?”

“It’s the latter. We’ve sedated him and we’ve brought him home to Aspen Creek. I think you should be here.”

“Aspen Creek? Is that where… where the pack is?” She nearly said ‘his’ pack because it was becoming increasingly obvious that was still how he felt about it. “What’s the nearest airport?”

“Bozeman. Charles will pick you up. Pack clothes for several days.” He hung up.

Charles would pick her up? From Bozeman? How would he know when she arrived?

Ignoring these thoughts, she Googled Aspen Creek, Montana but all she could find was a dot on the map, deep in the mountains. Was it a town? Bozeman Yellowstone International airport was close, though. She looked up flights and nearly threw herself from the chair, realizing that if she hurried she could catch the first one out.

She packed up the few items she had brought over to Bran’s, most of which she had draped over a chair. Then she took a couple of sweaters from Bran’s wardrobe, deciding that even if she didn’t wear them, he would probably like a change of clothes from the smarter things she had seen him pack for the assembly. So thinking she added in a T-shirt he wore a lot and a pair of sweats.

Then she called herself an Uber.

*

Leah had flown only a handful of times in her life. The first time it had been for the experience. The other times it had been because driving would have been prohibitively expensive. It was not a method of travel she enjoyed – being trapped in a tin can with a hundred or so humans, the smell of over-processed and over-preserved food and body odors circulating made her feel faintly sick.

She landed in Montana just after midday, her feet touching the ground with bone-deep relief. She had messaged Bran’s cell with the timings of her flight before she left but hadn’t heard anything back and there was still nothing when she landed.

In arrivals, however, Bran’s youngest son stuck out like a sore thumb, wearing a red T-shirt and jeans and no jacket. His face was set in a sullen scowl like she had seen before – though in the photos in Bran’s apartment he always had a smile. Perhaps this was just the way his face fell. Leah, too, knew she didn’t look ‘friendly’ at first sight. Her earliest Uber comments had oft repeated this. 

She walked up to him, eyes lowered to his broad chest. “Charles,” she greeted.

“Leah,” he replied. He hesitated as if he, too, was recalling their first unfortunate meeting. “May I take your bag?”

After a minute hesitation, Leah let him take the carry-on in this display of male courtesy, clutching the handle of her purse to herself.

He gestured to the exit. “I’m parked this way. How was the flight? Have you flown before?”

She nodded. “It was fine. Few times.”

“Commercial?”

What a strange question. “Yes, of course, commercial.”

“I have a plane,” he clarified, in an awkward way that suggested he was struggling to make conversation with her. “It’s small.”

“Oh.” Then, with alarm, “Are we flying somewhere else now?”

“No. Just driving.”

Wonderful. From a plane of humans to a small car with this dominant, angry werewolf. “Is Bran all right?”

“Still sedated.” 

He walked quickly, conveying his urgency. No doubt he wanted to be home with his father. Leah kept up with him. He was tall but so was she and she had long legs.

Like his father, Charles also drove an old Ford truck. An almost identical model, come to think of it. He opened the door for her and she hopped in, took her bag from him and stowed it at her feet.

She let Charles negotiate exiting the airport parking lot before asking the question she had really wanted to, “Is Davy dead?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at her lap. Well, there was a thing, she thought.

“I’m sorry,” Charles added.

“Bran killed him, then.”

He gave a sharp nod. “It was a justifiable death. Davy challenged him.”

Despite the situation, Leah rolled her eyes. “What an idiot.”

A small smile. “I don’t think he was in his right mind.”

“Davy? Or Bran.”

“Da was in a real temper,” Charles acknowledged, “but Davy had been building up to it.”

“So it was about me?”

“Yes.”

Guiltily, Leah chewed her bottom lip, staring out of the window. In the distance, beyond the flat pastures, she could see mountains topped with snow. “Is that why you wanted me here?”

“Da thinks you helped him get hold of the monster faster. The last time.”

“I didn’t know he thought that,” she said.

“A combination of the shock of seeing you, he thought. And a deep desire not to hurt you.”

Leah hadn’t realized quite how much Bran talked to his sons. She supposed it was only natural. Leah had no family, of course, so what would she know.

They were quiet for some time, Leah content to look out of the window, to watch the landscape go past, to keep herself distracted from her concern for Bran. They drove through several small towns. She supposed it reminded her of Colorado. Not as built up, perhaps. Or as busy.

“He will be all right, though?” she asked.

“I hope so. This… break… is rather closer to the previous one that I would have liked. The frequency is troubling.”

“How often does it usually happen?”

Charles glanced over at her. “Usually once, maybe twice a year. It used to be every few years.” 

“It’s getting worse?”

“Or maybe the techniques he’s using to control it aren’t as effective. I think moving to the city was a mistake but Sam—” Charles stopped himself from uttering what sounded like a disagreement.

Charles didn’t speak for the rest of the journey and Leah didn’t ask any more questions.

*

They turned down a short drive to an enormous house, which shouldn’t have really come as a surprise to her. With increasing discomfort, Leah followed Charles inside. Inside smelled of pack, layers and layers of werewolves who had been in and out of a space for decades until it was just one scent.

Each pack had their own indefinable smell. This was the Aspen Creek packs’ and within it, faint but discernable to Leah, was maple syrup, forest and books. Bran.

A young woman came out of another room. She was Native American in origin, perhaps not from both parents, however, and visibly pregnant.

Charles introduced them. “Mercy, this is Leah. Leah, this is Mercedes, my sister-in-law, Sam’s wife.”

This was the coyote daughter-in-law, then. “Nice to meet you,” Leah said nodding, trying to be polite. She was anxious to see Bran, wanted these niceties to be over with.

A watercolor version of Bran emerged from down the hall. Samuel. He was frowning. “Good, you’re here,” he said abruptly.

“Sam, this is Leah,” Mercedes said, in chastising tones. “Leah, this is Samuel. Bran’s eldest son. My husband.”

“Where is Bran?” Leah asked, trying, but failing, to keep the anxiety from her voice.

The young Native American woman smiled, her eyes somewhere around Leah’s chin. “Perhaps you’d like to freshen up before you see him? I’ve got his room ready for you.”

Leah shook her head. “I want to see him first. Please,” she added.

Samuel frowned at her harder, if possible. “He’s unconscious.”

“How did you sedate him?” Leah hadn’t thought such a thing was possible. “And I still want to see him.”

“A mix of ketamine and silver. And I said no.”

“Actually, you didn’t,” Leah replied tartly.

“Let her see him, Sam,” the woman sighed. “If he’s unconscious, what harm could it do?”

Her husband bristled, obviously unhappy with being countermanded. At this point, if he refused, Leah was just going to find Bran herself, damn the consequences.

“Fine,” he said. “This way.” He stalked off, back the way he came. Leah put her bag down at the base of the stairs and followed him, his wife coming up behind her. The wolf wasn’t happy about that, either. The wolf was – in general – very unhappy about everything right then.

Predictably, the Cornicks had a large, werewolf-safe room in their basement that Samuel unlocked with a code. The door was thick, obviously reinforced, and Leah felt the prickle of silver as she entered, following Samuel down a flight of stone stairs.

Something within Leah revolted at the sight of Bran, strapped down in this hateful room, his skin grey-pale. She had a horrible feeling it was her wolf. Things were very bad indeed if her wolf had moved herself to getting involved.

“Can I touch him?” she asked, softly, heading straight towards the bed.

Though her husband growled menacingly, it was Bran’s daughter-in-law who answered, ignoring Samuel. She was standing at the top of the stairs. In her condition, Leah supposed entering the room was risky. Her husband was already plenty agitated as it was. “I don’t see why not. They pumped him with so much to get him on the jet, it should take hours to wear off.”

Leah was moving before the woman had finished speaking. She took Bran’s hand with one of her own and rested her other on his forehead. He felt cool and slightly damp. But he was alive, that was all that mattered. “And when the sedative wears off?” She stroked his hair which was clumped with sweat.

“I don’t know. It depends on how bad the monster has its hold on him. Sometimes it’s a couple of days. Sometimes longer.”

Despite not liking having an audience, Leah bent her head to kiss his forehead. No doubt it was her imagination but she thought she tasted the burn of silver on his skin. She lingered, smelling his skin, the sick-sweat of him overlaying his normal, healthy-Bran smell. Leah wasn’t a crier but she felt the tingle behind her eyes, the threat of tears. _I’m sorry_ , she thought at him. This had been her fault.

“Why don’t you come upstairs. I’ve put you in his room. You can freshen up. You can have something to eat. If you’d like, you could Change and go for a run. It’s nearly dark and out here no one really cares.”

The thought of a run was appealing but being away from him was not. But she would like to wash the smell of the airplane off herself. “I’ll be back later,” she told Bran, as if he could hear her.

*

Dinner with Bran’s family was awkward and not because of Leah herself, who in an effort to make herself invisible remained all but mute. The family dynamics were, as Bran had indicated, quite challenging.

There was tension between Samuel and his mate, as if they had recently had an argument and had not settled it yet. Between Charles and Samuel there was a brittle politeness. Both were very dominant but if she was going to put a bet on who was more powerful, it would be the younger son, though the older clearly felt age gave him precedence.

To her surprise, she was warming more towards the sullen Charles than the aggravated Samuel, all in all.

“Leah, would you like more potatoes?” Mercedes asked, lifting the dish, her eyes on Leah’s left cheek.

Leah found the Coyote Walker quite confusing, just generally. If she was honest, having an Other at the table who, in nature, Leah’s wolf would have chased off her territory, was a little wearying. Hopefully she would get used to it as there was ostensibly nothing really to dislike about her. There was also an odd hierarchy going on. As mate of the Alpha – one of them – Mercy should have met Leah’s eyes with confidence. Though she wasn’t a werewolf and therefore wasn’t as dominant as Leah was, it wouldn’t have mattered in the technical sense. Leah would have been polite about it and recognized her authority, even if she didn’t feel it. It was ingrained in her to do so. 

Mercedes also didn’t look Charles in the eye.

The whole thing was strange.

It wasn’t Leah's place to comment, of course, so she kept her thoughts to herself, eating mechanically. The food was good, the kind of simple home-cooking that Bran himself did, if maybe lacking in his finesse. She thanked Mercedes for the meal and then helped her clean up which, gratifyingly, the two men also did. At least they hadn’t expected the women to serve them.

After she had put away the last dish, Mercedes dried her hands. “I’m going to go and check on the kids,” she said, to no one and everyone.

“I’ll drive you,” Samuel said. Leah guessed they had, sensibly, left the children elsewhere for the night.

“No, you should stay here, in case your father wakes up.”

Samuel blinked. “He’ll be out for at least another couple of hours. I’d like to see my children, Mercy.”

“If they’re awake, which they shouldn’t be, I’ll Facetime you,” she said briskly, walking out of the kitchen.

Leah, and Charles, stayed in the kitchen as Samuel followed her and they heard the sound of a whispered argument commence. Feeling out of place, Leah looked around for something to do. There was a smaller version of Bran’s coffee maker on the counter, obviously rarely used. She went through the most obvious cupboards and found an unopened packet of ground coffee.

“Would you like one?” Leah asked.

Charles was sitting on the bench around the small kitchen table. They had used the dining room for the meal. This table was covered in newspapers, which Charles was looking at in a desultory fashion. “Yes, thank you.”

The noise of the coffee machine was almost loud enough to block the sound of the couple fighting in the living room. The front door closed, then an internal door somewhere to the right. Clearly Samuel’s mate had got her way. 

She gave Charles his coffee and he nodded his thanks. She suspected he hadn’t actually wanted one.

“I… thought I would go sit with Bran.” She wasn’t _quite_ asking for permission. But nearly.

Charles hesitated slightly. “All right. But I will have to sit at the top of the stairs, just in case he does wake up early. Mercy’s right – Da is not always consistent.”

“I imagine not much holds him back,” Leah said drily.

His son’s mouth quirked. “Correct.”

Charles unlocked the door of Bran's jail and let her in. There was a wooden chair, obviously something no one minded being destroyed and couldn’t be used as an effective weapon, which Leah pulled up next to the bed. She sipped her coffee and looked at Bran. Did he look less grey? Maybe. She touched the hair that was over his ears, then tucked it behind the upper shell, stroking her finger over the whorls of cartilage, then down to his earlobe. 

She loved him, of course. What’s more, it seemed entirely natural to love him. She’d already been halfway there the night of the meteor shower, seeing him wet and laughing on the roof. What an extraordinary thing to happen after all this time, all these years. And with such a man.

Leah lowered her forehead to rest against his arm. She had been a desultory Christian as a human, even more so as a werewolf. But she prayed he would wake up soon and be himself. 

*

Leah woke because she felt like she was being watched. Initially when she opened her eyes, she didn’t recognize where she was. This bed smelled like Bran but wasn’t his room in Seattle. It was cold, too.

She jolted as she simultaneously remembered she was in Montana, now, and the being watched feeling was because she was. _He_ was standing over her, golden eyes peering down, arms loose at his sides, breathing deeply. Leah froze. If she could have stopped her heartbeat, she would have done. She certainly stopped breathing.

How had he escaped? He had been restrained in the basement, within a silver cage. Leah had seen Charles lock the reinforced silver door, both manually and electronically, when she had left him that evening. Even if Bran had been in his right mind, he shouldn’t have been able to escape.

But then Bran had never really seemed to abide by normal rules.

After a moment, Bran the monster climbed on the bed. She cringed, her body curling defensively, but all he did was spread himself down next to her on his front, fixed gaze never leaving her face. The space between his blinks grew steadily shorter and shorter until he closed his eyes.

She took a few shallow breaths, trying to calm her racing heart. Did she dare get up? What would she do? Wake Samuel and Mercedes? Scream for Charles?

Once again, she kicked herself for being without a weapon. At the very least she should have taken a kitchen knife with her to bed. How had she lost such basic training?

She seemed to lie there, debating this issue, until the sun rose, pressing through drapes that let in a lot of light. Bran was still next to her. Asleep.

Leah gave in and turned on her side very, very slowly.

Bran woke up. And it was Bran, hazel eyes blinking against the light, looking confused and crossly half-asleep.

“Oh thank god,” she breathed. 

“What— how—” He pushed himself up on one hand, looking around the room and then back at her. “How are you here?”

“You don’t remember?”

Bran closed his eyes, as if pained. He wiped a hand across his face. “No, I’m beginning to. I wish I wasn’t.” Carefully, he plucked the neckline of his T-shirt away from his body and wrinkled his nose. “I stink.”

“You do,” Leah said, eagerly, and then tackled him to the bed, covering him with her own body. If she could have crawled inside him, she would have done. She kissed his salty neck, several times. “But you’re you. You’re _you_.”

“Oof.” Bran pressed his hand to the back of her head as she drank in great lungsful of him in between kisses, pressing them to his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth. “That’s debatable. Leah, really, I must taste as disgusting as I smell.”

Relief, or hormones, had translated Leah’s desire to crawl inside him to the other way around. She sat up, straddling him, and tugged up his T-shirt. “I really don’t care.”

He grunted and started wriggling them to the edge of the bed, letting her free him from his shirt. “Then you can come with me whilst I shower.” He patted her butt. “Hmm? Best of both worlds?”

“Fine,” Leah said, clambering off him and heading towards the en-suite. When he didn’t immediately follow, instead sat on the edge of the bed staring down at his toes, she came back. “Bran?”

He squinted at her. “Sorry, I just— did I kill John Davy?”

Leah’s desire ebbed in the face of the hard reality was he was now remembering. Relief had made her stupid. “Yes.”

“Fuck.” Bran pinched the bridge of his nose. “You didn’t hear me say that,” he added.

She smiled, a little. He didn’t like swearing, particularly in front of her. She stepped forward, touching the tufts of his hair lightly, and Bran pressed his face to her stomach. She folded her hands around his head, stroking downwards. She didn’t think she was a natural comforter but it seemed to come to her easier with him. “I’m sorry.”

His arms came around her. “ _Damn_ ,” he whispered, sorrowfully.

She stepped forward a little more so she could hold him tighter, curled downwards to kiss the top of his head. “Charles said… it was justifiable. I know that’s not comforting.”

“He challenged me. They know better than to challenge me. _I_ know better than to accept.”

“Charles said he was antagonizing you.”

“The subject was antagonizing.” He breathed out hot air onto her stomach, through her T-shirt, and then stood. “I have to shower. I can still smell him on me and it’s making the wolf angry.”

Leah wandered after him into the bathroom, more hesitantly. He raised his eyebrows at her expectantly when he had stripped of the jeans he was wearing, eyes lingering on her still-clothed form. She peeled her nightshirt off and then tugged down her panties, followed his naked form into the preposterously large walk-in shower. He fiddled with the shower dial, cycling through a series of options until water ‘just’ came from above.

Watching her, Bran wet a sponge, added soap, and scrubbed his front efficiently.

“Do my back?” he said, handing her a sponge as if they showered together all the time.

He turned, lowered his head. Leah rubbed the sponge over his back, thinking how oddly appealing he was wet, how much she enjoyed running the sponge over his muscles, down his butt, watching the water and soap suds pour off him. It was so intimate.

The surge of relief came back unexpectedly. He was alive. He was him. He was safe.

She stepped forward, pressing against his spine, and kissed the curve of his neck, wrapping her arms about his stomach. He shuddered, once, and then turned, pushed her against the tile, out of the direct spray of the water, and kissed her. The combination of the cold tile at her back and the hot wet body at the front made her shiver. He slipped his tongue into her mouth and she sucked on it, pulling him close.

His kissing became more frantic. Their teeth clicked, their bodies slipping and sliding against each other. He pushed his thigh between her legs and she rubbed herself against it. She wanted him badly.

“Can I have you here?” he asked her.

“That was,” she paused to arch against him as he bit her neck, hard, “the idea.”

His hands gripped her thighs, exerted a little force. “Now?”

She reached between her legs, touched her clit, started to tease herself. “Oh, I see.”

Bran pressed a firm kiss to her mouth. His eyelashes were clumped together, his eyes intent. “Yes, very little finesse this morning.”

He didn’t have to lift her too far, just enough to spread her legs, pinioning her against the tile. Her fingers slid over her clit so she could take hold of the head of his cock, sliding it over herself, nudge it against where she wanted him. He watched, his mouth open, enraptured. “Now?” he asked.

“Yes— oh!” He snapped his hips and thrust inside her, hard. Her eyes rolled backwards. _Christ,_ she thought.

The pace he set was a fierce one, matched by the fierce expression on his face. She rubbed at her clit, correctly anticipating that this was not going to last long.

Held against the wall, she couldn’t match him the way she would have done in bed, was just receiving what he was giving. It was good, though. It was hard and intense and just what she wanted, him filling her completely, near-painfully.

Her climax began to approach, the kind that she knew would leave her weak. His breath was leaving him in pants, his eyes fathomless with all encompassing desire. She tipped over into her orgasm suddenly and he captured her mouth, groaning with her, as if he could take her pleasure into himself. She clenched around him, each release rippling through her, her fingers slowing as she became more sensitive.

Bran pulled himself from her suddenly and she looked down, wondering if she’d missed him coming. But he was still flushed and hard, jutting out angrily from his hips. “I want your mouth on me,” he told her, lowering her feet to the floor.

A rush of heat went through her. An order. She felt her knees quiver and she sank down. It wasn’t an order if it was something she wanted to do, she thought. And she wanted him. Every part.

Hands on his thighs, she sucked him all the way down, tasting herself and then the saltiness of him. He moaned loudly above her, his hands tugging on her hair, the pressure points of his fingertips grazing the back of her skull as she bobbed her head back and forwards. As she felt his need grow, she got faster, wetter, sloppier, sucking and slurping, licked the vein from his root to tip, swirled the head with the point of her tongue and then took him all the way back inside again and repeated the whole thing.

Bran made an urgent noise. He pressed his hand against the back of her head. “I’m going to come,” he told her, and he did so.

She swallowed frantically as he pulsed in her mouth, swallowed and swallowed as he shuddered until he was soft on her tongue. She gently released him.

He leaned his head against the tiles and she rested hers on the outside of his thigh. She stroked the fair hairs that she found there. She loved these hairs, she thought, nonsensically. She loved this thigh. His knee. She loved him all the way to the top and back down again.

Bran touched her head then held his hand down to her to pull her to standing. “Sorry. That was a little…um.”

Leah found herself smiling helplessly. “Are you embarrassed you asked me to go down on you?”

He was. Clearly. “Ah.”

“You were very polite about it. And for the record you shouldn’t be embarrassed.” She kissed him quickly. “I’m going to wash my hair now.”

“Sure. I’m going to just… lean here.” Bran gestured vaguely to himself. The wall. Then grinned. “And watch you.”

*

They were mid-way through dressing when a hesitant voice said. “Bran? Are you… in there?”

Bran’s head popped through the neck hole of his T-shirt. “I am, Mercy. I’m fine.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” she sighed. They heard her feet move away, moments later heard murmurs of relief downstairs.

Leah was sitting on the edge of the bed, braiding her damp hair. “Do you know how you got out?”

“Nope.” Bran enunciated the ‘p’ very clearly. “New trick of mine, though. That will thrill everyone.” He sighed. “I need to talk to you about what happened at the WAS.”

“I should imagine so.”

He came to sit by her side, took her hand. “I know you don’t read the papers but you are presumably aware that the numbers of werewolves have been in a steady freefall for the last fifty years.”

She nodded. This was not news so much as a sad reality of their kind. A combination of violent lifestyle and limited success in humans being changed. Changing humans was, of course, highly regulated now, through the Bureau of Werewolf Affairs. Very few humans ‘made’ the official cut to be Changed and those that did tended to die. Leah had long assumed this was deliberate. The Bureau was human controlled, after all.

Unauthorized Changes did happen, of course, but the werewolf who Changed that human did so with the risk of life imprisonment if they were caught. And imprisonment was certain death – if they weren’t killed by another inmate, by a mysterious ‘accident’, then they usually killed themselves after a few years. A werewolf was not meant to be caged. 

“One of the consequence of this steady decline is that our packs are becoming smaller and weaker. For the last couple of years, there has been a movement to ban lone wolves and force those that we have into the pack structure once again.”

Leah’s head jerked. She pulled her hand from his. “What?”

Bran continued, his eyes fixed on her mouth, then rising to her eyes. “What’s more, last month, a much publicized piece of human-funded research claimed that lone wolves are more violent than those who belong to packs. So now we are under pressure from the government to ‘look into this’. It was a big topic on the WAS agenda.”

She felt completely blindsided. Of course she had known none of this. She deliberately avoided the papers. What news they reported on werewolves was often salacious and derogatory and just served to make her angry or sad. But this was… this was something she should probably have known. “I wish you’d mentioned.”

Bran nodded, a little, as if he admitted partial culpability for this but at the same time laid the ultimate responsibility at her feet. “I’ll admit the fervor of the Alphas surprised me but then perhaps it shouldn’t have. They feel vulnerable. Unfortunately, one of the most frequently raised ‘solutions’ was that of reabsorbing the comparatively recently emancipated females. An easier task, everyone thought, than to first tackle the larger issue of the male lone wolf contingent.”

She jumped up. “ _What?_ ”

He winced. “Yes. Davy, amongst others who have ‘lost’ their females to the emancipation law, was making a motion to re-instate you and others like you into their original packs.”

A deeply unpleasant squeezing sensation manifested in Leah’s chest. Panic. “He can’t do that.”

“No, he can’t because I tore out his throat,” Bran pointed out, not without sadness. “But he was not the only one. If the motion picks up traction, the Werewolf Council will be forced to put it to a vote. And if that passes, it will go to the Bureau to make a final decision. The humans would no doubt like it if all the werewolves were neatly parceled into their easily locatable packs.”

Leah shook her head, frantically. She turned, walked three steps, then realized she didn’t know where she was going and came back. “Is that… why you killed him?”

“No,” Bran said quickly. Then he amended it, “Partially. I’ll get to that part.”

She moved back to the main issue. “Is this motion going to pick up traction?”

“I should think so. There is a great deal of panic amongst our people. I had… missed that. But if it does pick up traction, you can be damn sure that I will build a case for equality. If lone females are expected to rejoin pack life, then the males will be as well.”

That was… something, Leah supposed, sneering unconsciously. 

She started to pace, chewing over her thoughts, not noticing that Bran had slipped into a reverie and was watching her through half-closed, analytical eyes. “So it’s not just John Davy, then,” he mused.

Leah glanced at him, then looked away. “Yes. No. Yes. I don’t know.” She waved a hand. “He wasn’t always… bad.”

“He was in love with you.”

“He most assuredly _was not_ ,” Leah said hotly, waving a finger at him. “He just decided, one day, that he wanted me.”

Bran let his statement, and her fervent denial, go. “So you requested emancipation.”

“No, I had already done that. I think he thought announcing that he wanted me would change my mind. I refused. I told him, amongst many other things, that I wasn’t going to be his _mistress_ if that was what he thought. I may not have got on particularly well with Elsa but she was a good wife to him and good for the pack and I respected her for that, if nothing else. _God._ ” The pressure in her chest was something else. She pushed at it with her palm, as if she could move it around, release it somehow.

“I presume he didn’t take no for an answer.”

“No,” she said with an ill-humored laugh. “You know what I did for him? My job?”

“I understood you were an enforcer.”

“Yes. A nice way of saying that I took his orders, or his second’s and third’s, and executed them. We had a big pack,” she said, almost incidentally. “Once. We had a big pack. And it was a big job, keeping everyone in line. When I refused him, he ordered me to kill his mate. He thought, if I killed her, he could make me his mate instead, that this would mean I would stay. That being his mate would give me what I desired, like being the wife of a powerful man was _just the same_ as having my own freedom.”

“But of course,” was his mild response to her vitriol. “A logical step. His mate is still alive, however.”

Leah snorted. “I tried to kill her _badly_. I was caught.”

“Bravo,” he murmured. “And you were expelled from the pack.”

“Via emancipation, which was a bribe for my silence. He never revealed to anyone it had been his order. _Elsa_ thought I was vying for her position and that he was unfairly generous to not kill me. Can you believe it. She still calls me to…” She waved her arms expansively. She was sure he could imagine. “All the females were on her side. I’m not sorry he’s dead. Did he tell you this? Is this why you killed him?”

“Alas, no, though I am very glad you have now told me the full, very sorry tale. And, at the risk of lowering myself to his level, when Davy announced his intention to return you to his pack with what I can only describe as lust in his eyes, I refuted this as an option. He said I had no authority over you. So I… made myself one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I declared you my mate in front of the entirety of the WAS and _then_ he challenged me.” It was Bran’s turn to wave his hand expansively, a grim smile on his face. “I await, now, your justifiable fury.”

*

After expressing her justifiable fury, mostly non-verbally, Leah went for a run. A long one. As it so happened, screaming at a man who completely agreed that he was in the wrong was neither satisfying or enjoyable. They had also been interrupted, possibly rightly, by Charles who thought enflaming Bran’s temper when not so many hours before he had been under the control of his monster was not the brightest move.

Thus, a long run.

She stuck to the general path that Charles had suggested, a gentle, winding incline that took her up above Aspen Creek to a viewpoint that vaguely took her breath away.

She stood, hands on her hips at the top, panting, still furious.

Furious with Bran, yes. Furious with the situation fractionally more. Furious that this had been the only solution he had seen to protect her because she still _needed_ protecting. That was the galling thing. She was a werewolf. She had killed for her kind countless times. She could hunt, shoot, she could _run_. She had a job. She had a home. She had survived, no _thrived_ , for twenty years without the protection of the male half of her species.

And in a roomful of Alphas, they had all-but decided that women like her should go back to their packs to ‘strengthen’ the species.

Groaning, she covered her face with her hands. It was a disaster. And it was a disaster that was going to happen. She could see it, as clearly as if it was unfolding in front of her right now. Werewolves were in trouble. And she was going to be a sacrifice, the first, presumably, of many. The females first. Then the men. She reckoned they would have a hard time tracking down every lone male who had been roaming America since the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Leah started on her return journey at a less breakneck pace. Bran had created for them a more personal problem, too. If they hadn’t already been sleeping together, declaring her as his mate in front of an audience would have been something that could easily be broken. The wolf didn’t care much for words. But they had shared more than words, had come together physically time and time again. She had no doubt Bran’s wolf thought the deal was all but sealed.

When she had accused him of that, this morning, he hadn’t denied it. Just said it was ‘manageable’.

“Is it?” she had yelled. “So if I packed up and left now, moved away from Wolf Towers and went and joined, I don’t know, Angus’s pack you would be absolutely fine, would you? What if I agreed to mate with Daniel Hopper?”

His uncensored facial expression had been a picture of ill-contained wrath. No, Bran would not be ‘fine’.

It had been this point that Charles had interrupted with his timely knock on Bran’s bedroom door and Leah decided she would go for a run. The argument had become circular, anyway.

She stopped, leaning against a tree, pulled off a sneaker and knocked it against the trunk, releasing the small stone that had been bothering her. 

Of course, Leah knew if Bran had just asked her to be his mate she would have said yes. She loved him. She wanted to be with him. Now the choice – everything in her life seemed to boil down to choice – had been once again taken away from her.

“Fricking yippee,” she said, putting her shoe back on.

*

Leah returned to find the house was fuller than when she had left. Of course, this was because it was the Alpha’s house – though she was uncertain if both or only one of the sons lived there – and the living area and kitchen had several other members of the Aspen Creek pack lingering comfortably.

She spotted a pretty, young-looking werewolf and it wasn’t a stretch to work out that she was the Omega by the faintly ethereal look she wore. A refined and handsome man with a natural tanned complexion – Middle Eastern, perhaps? - was shadowing her. That would be the Moor, then.

Leah ignored them all, ignored their stares and prying eyes, and climbed the stairs, intending to shower for the second time that day. Significantly less pleasurably than the first.

Bran wasn’t in his room, as she had suspected he wouldn’t be. She stripped and stepped into the shower, rinsed her hair and soaped herself up. She wondered if she ought to leave, go home to Wolf Towers and try to get on with her life. Someone would have to drive her to the airport, though. She could probably convince Mercedes, who seemed like the sanest of the bunch.

Once clean, wrapped in a big, soft towel, Leah lay on the bed, finding herself unwilling to leave the safety of the bedroom and face her problems. She rummaged around in her purse for her cell phone, saw she had a message from Serena. _Are you really mated to the guy in the penthouse?_

She started to type back a categorical ‘no’ and then deleted it. Wrote instead, _You could do better than Daniel, Serena._

Leah watched the little dots that said someone was typing appear. Disappear. Appear. Disappear.

 _He’s amazing in bed_.

She chuckled.

_And can be quite sweet._

Less funny, Leah thought, sneering.

_I don’t know what I’m doing._

That was fair. Leah typed back, _Neither do I. But you can tell Yulia/Daniel I’m off the market._

Sighing, she closed her eyes. When the door slowly opened, she resolutely _kept_ them closed, hoping Bran would get the hint.

The bed dipped. She opened one eye. The child sitting at the end of Bran’s bed was an unpleasant surprise.

“Taid?” it said to her.

Leah sat up, clutching the towel to her chest. “Um.” The child was of walking age, or at least climbing age if it could get up onto Bran’s immense bed. He had a mop of dark hair and big brown eyes. He was chewing on what honestly looked like a rag. “Are you perhaps Mercy’s? Is your dad Samuel?” she suggested. 

“No Taid?” he said, winsomely, looking around. He turned and, to Leah’s alarm, began to back off the bed in a precarious manner, butt first.

She jumped out of bed and hovered, hands held out, but unwilling to touch him. Human children – she presumed he was human? – were very fragile and this one was, as he was related to Bran, unfortunately very important. “I… is Taid your grandfather? Bran?”

Ignoring her, he padded towards the open door of Bran’s bedroom. Was a child this age fine with stairs? Leah had no context for this situation. She pulled on a pair of sweats from her bag and, no time for a bra, then a T-shirt – both of which she belatedly realized were Bran’s – and followed the toddling, diminutive form, trying to appear casual and not at all like she was hunting him. He stopped to look at her a couple of times, enquiringly. “I was thinking of going to the kitchen,” she explained. “But you take your time.”

He nodded slowly. Tucking the rag into the waistband of his small pants, he approached the top of the stairs and grabbed hold of the first wooden spindle of the banister and began to carefully make his way down.

Still having visions of this small being falling to his death, possibly breaking his grandfather’s heart, Leah stalked him down the stairs, taking a step at a time like he did. He stopped at one point, looked up at her and smiled – yes, that was a Cornick smile – and then continued.

When they reached the bottom, Leah sighed in relief and looked up to find several very amused eyes on her, including those of her erstwhile ‘mate’.

“Dylan, did you find Leah? Well done,” Bran said, approaching them.

Dylan raised his arms expectantly to be lifted, an ecstatic “Taid!” on his lips. Bran picked him up with the ease of a man who had probably had many grandchildren in his life. He looked Leah up and down and then lingered on her chest with an avaricious smile. “I like your outfit.”

“Hmm,” she said, about turning and marching back upstairs to put a bra on. Honestly.

*

Leah tolerated another meal, this time with even more people. She was diagonally opposite the Omega who was, judging from how overwrought Leah suddenly felt, pumping out whatever magic Omegas carried.

“I thought Omegas were supposed to be peaceful,” Leah murmured to Mercedes, who was sitting next to her. Leah had purposefully put herself as far away from Bran as she could, which just so happened to be at the end of the table with the children and their mother. 

Mercedes was encouraging her youngest to eat, ignoring her own nearly-full plate of food. “She’s still learning. What about this piece of chicken, Dylan?” She pointed to a morsel on his plate, which he sneered at. He seemed only really interested in the cheese.

The two other children were older and required less maintenance. One had informed her, robustly, that he was six and didn’t like girls and then ate his meal staring at her. The other was eight and had a book open on his lap that he was attempting to read whilst spooning macaroni cheese into his mouth. He was only partially successful in both endeavors.

“What kind of magic do they have?” Leah asked, for she had been quite curious about this. Her memories of Walker abilities were hazy. “Bran says they don’t change.”

She was given a look that suggested her question might have been indelicate. “Ah. They can see ghosts, mostly,” she replied nevertheless, lowering her voice.

“Really.” Leah looked at Mercedes with fresh eyes. “So you can…?”

“Mmm.” The young woman used her finger to push the much maligned piece of chicken towards her son’s searching hand again. He mulishly picked up another cube of cheese.

“Huh.” She was tempted to ask if there were any ghosts right now. If this pack house was like her old one, there were dead a-plenty.

“It’s caused a few sleepless nights.”

“I can imagine.” She looked sympathetically at them, even the one who was aggressively glaring at her. She ignored him, which was her preferred tactic with children, the few she had ever come into contact.

She looked down at Mercedes’s protruding stomach. Four children. It was honestly astonishing.

“Finished,” the angry middle child announced to the table. He then burped very loudly. This made the Omega smile which, because she was an Omega, meant everyone at the table was suddenly very happy.

Good grief, Leah thought, even as she unwillingly smiled herself. What an off-putting pack this was.

“Then you may get down and play _quietly_ ,” Mercedes said, apparently letting the unpleasant manners go.

Middle child – she had been told his name but she had promptly forgotten it – got down from the table and stomped off, casting Leah one last fulminating look as he did so.

“Did I do something to offend him?” Leah asked mildly.

His mother’s lips twitched. “Bran told the children you were his favorite this morning. Pedr took this very poorly.”

Leah rolled her eyes. At both Bran and angry middle child. “Honestly.”

*

Not really sure what else to do with herself, Leah pulled a stack of magazines from the coffee table in the living area and ensconced herself in an armchair. The magazines gave her a useful prop to pretend to be absorbed in whilst she was really watching the pack go about their business around her. On the couch across from her, the oldest Cornick grandchild was silently absorbed in his book, one thumb stuck in his mouth.

It seemed Mercedes and Samuel didn’t live in this big house and neither did Charles. Which begged the question of who did. Was it Bran? Surely it didn’t sit empty most of the time? In any case, there was an office down the hall that was referred to as Bran’s which the three men seemed to come and go from for the most of the afternoon.

She watched Charles have a conversation with the Omega – Anna, she was called – which was so lovelorn she almost couldn’t stand it. Then the Moor took her ‘home’ which, honestly, was yet again utterly confusing to her. Mercedes came back from upstairs, having put the smallest child down for a sleep, and started preparing dinner. She seemed to do all the cooking and she looked pretty darn tired of it.

A man came by, a tall one, with red dreadlocks, and went into the kitchen to speak to Mercedes briefly. She heard him roar with laughter at whatever she told him. Then he came out and dropped himself down on the armchair adjacent to Leah to have a good look at her. “Dutch?” he suggested.

“Half.” Leah flicked through her magazine. He continued to look. “Did you just come over here to stare?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I see. And do you have a name?”

“Colin Taggart. But everyone calls me Tag. And you’d be Leah.”

Leah lowered her magazine, finally interested. “You’re writing the book about Waterloo,” she said. This was Bran’s friend.

The large man’s face was suddenly wreathed with smiles. “I am! Have you read it?”

“Ah. No. I was hoping for the final edited version,” she said.

He waved a hand. “Oh that’ll be a while yet.”

She thought detected an accent. Celtic, of some flavor. Irish? Scottish? “Yes, Bran has mentioned,” she said dryly.

“Where is the Marrok, anyway?”

Leah didn’t know who, or what, the ‘Marrok’ was but given the context she could only assume it was Bran. “In his office with his sons.”

Colin Taggart heaved himself up decisively, slapping the armrests. “I’ll go pay my respects, then.”

He left and as he did so, Leah caught the dark eyes of Bran’s grandchild, who gave her a penetrating look before returning to his book. She wondered where the angry middle child was and if she should be concerned about finding a snake in the bed later. The bed she would be sharing with Bran.

Deciding she needed some action, lest she descend once again into the never-ending circular thoughts of that morning, Leah got up and went to see if Mercedes needed some help in the kitchen. She found her setting the smaller kitchen table for three. Apparently she was preparing two meals – an earlier one for the children, a later meal for the adults. Leah’s face told Mercedes what she thought of this.

“It’s fine. I do a lot of batch cooking,” Mercedes said, waving her paring knife around as she cut up vegetables. “It’s mostly a question of reheating something. The kids are just having vegetables and hummus, the one meal they truly all agree on.”

Leah looked around, “I’ll… clean.” The kitchen was, in fact, a mess.

“I would be very grateful.” Mercedes popped a carrot baton into her mouth.

Leah ended up emptying and re-loading the dishwasher, cleaning the counters, sweeping the floor. It reminded her of being back in the pack, where they each took turns doing particular chores in the main house. Elsa didn’t stand for the old view that the Alpha’s mate did the bulk of the domestic work. She had reasoned, quite fairly, that since her house was lived in by the pack as much as it was by her and John, then everyone had to take their turn.

So thinking, Leah mentioned this to Mercedes, who snorted. “I can’t imagine the old wolves in this pack agreeing to that.”

Leah tossed a panful of floor sweepings into the trash. It was nearly full. She should probably take it out. “Samuel could just order it so.”

“Hmm,” came the response, “but they wouldn’t necessarily do it.”

“Why not?”

“Sam,” Mercedes sighed, portioning vegetables onto three plastic plates, “is not Bran.”

Leah narrowed her eyes. “What if Charles did it?”

She shrugged. “Same deal.”

“Interesting. I had wondered how this… split worked.”

“It’s pretty fragile.”

“That must be very stressful.”

Mercedes nodded. She leaned out of the kitchen door. “Boys!” she called. “Food!”

The middle child came through almost immediately, casting a very black look at Leah which – unfortunately – made her laugh. Unfortunately, because it made him even angrier and he positively stomped to the table, grinding his teeth. Behind his head, his mother smothered her own smile. “Apple juice, Pedr?” she offered, masterfully controlling her voice as she poured.

Dylan was brought in by his father, who deposited him on a chair with a kiss on his head. Without pausing, he then did the same thing to Pedr and then to Mercedes, who tipped her head up at the last minute to catch his mouth. Leah looked away politely. When they parted, it was with soft smiles and affectionate looks. Samuel brushed his mate’s baby bump and then left the kitchen, humming to himself looking, for the first time, relaxed and contented. He even gave Leah a smile.

Not so bad, then, Leah thought. Perhaps, like a normal relationship, there were just ups and downs. And perhaps, she also thought, it was easier when the real Alpha of the Aspen Creek pack was home.

*

She and Bran prepared for bed silently and then climbed in, side by side, still silent. It was odd getting into a bed with him without it being preceded by, or for the purpose of, sex. Odd but not particularly awkward. It was just new.

“Are we having a fight?” he asked, when she had turned off the bedside light on her side.

“I don’t think so. But we’re not _not_ having a fight,” Leah added, for that was how she felt. Prickly. Irritated. Bothered.

“Gotcha.” Then he rolled onto his side, his arm sneaking around her. “I don’t suppose…?”

She frowned at him. “The last time the monster took over, I thought you avoided sex.” She had forgotten this earlier that morning.

“Only because I thought you might be hesitant given the circumstances.”

Leah snorted. “Well, that was a miscommunication, then.” But she put her hand on his wrist, stopping it from moving. She stared at the ceiling. “Your sons can’t give an order to your pack.”

He made a noise of disagreement. “Certainly they can.”

“Mercedes doesn’t think so. Not if they don’t concur with it. She also can’t hold my gaze. The Alpha’s mate should have dominance.”

“I think Mercy uses that mostly as a technique,” he replied drily.

“Oh, yes? On Charles? Does she look _you_ in the eye?”

“She’s just being cautious.”

“I don’t think so, Bran. And why do they call you the Marrok?” She had heard the name again that evening.

“It’s… a nickname. From before I came to America.”

She tasted the lie on him. She turned to look at him, their noses almost brushing they were so close. “That’s not true,” she whispered.

Bran’s eyes flared with surprise. “You could tell?”

“Yes.” Perhaps this was the first time he had ever lied to her. Or normally he was just better at it.

For some reason, he was moved to kiss her, softly, at the corner of her mouth. “It’s a title, in a manner of speaking. But it’s meaningless.” Truth. He kissed her again, just as softly. “Shall we go home tomorrow?”

 _Home_. Wolf Towers. Seattle. Her apartment. His. She wanted to - badly. “Is that your home? Or is it here? This house?” This room, this bed. The view of the mountains from these windows. His sons in the same town. His grandchildren down the road.

“Both have been.” His thumb stroked her temple. “But now it’s wherever you are.”

Leah closed her eyes as her heart flip-flopped. “And if I wanted to stay in Seattle? Or move to Florida?”

“That would be fine, too. Though, the humidity would probably kill me.”

She ignored his attempt at humor. “And what if I never said ‘yes’ to you.” Leah tapped her chest, tamping down her wolf’s complaint that the mating bargain which was just in reach was being pulled from her. Bran didn’t need to know that. Didn’t need to know that the wolf was on board, saw in him a compatible mate. “What if we were never properly mated.”

She heard him swallow. He lowered his head, nose touching her shoulder. “I believe I could manage it. If that’s what you wanted,” he said quietly.

“You wanted to mate with someone unlovable,” she reminded him, sharply. “You wanted _no-strings._ ”

Bran barked out a laugh. “I think we both agreed _that_ was ridiculous. You are not unlovable. Quite the opposite. And I think if I recall correctly _you_ suggested the no-strings.”

Leah blew out a breath, throwing a hand in the air, letting it drop back onto the mattress in her frustration. “I just… I just wish you’d _asked me_.”

“Would you have said yes?”

“Yes. Probably. Definitely,” she admitted. There was no point avoiding the truth.

Bran metaphorically grasped hold of this with both hands. And crowded over her, pressing her down into the mattress. “Then pretend the WAS didn’t happen. Pretend I asked you,” he said urgently, no longer talking in the whispered, intimate tones of the bedroom. “On the couch in my library, I wanted to. But we’d just discussed the damned Hopper boy trying to coerce you into mating with him before his time ran out. It would have been deeply uncivilized of me to follow that up with a proposal. And… I thought it was too soon. I thought you weren’t quite as head over heels for me as I am for you.”

She stared up at him, wide-eyed with uncertainty. “Head over heels? Really Bran?”

It didn’t _taste_ like a lie. Now that she knew what one felt like from him.

“Head over heels in love with you.” Bran kissed her like he was trying to convince her. “My favorite.”

She laughed a little, helplessly, against his lips. “Oh, that has put me in Pedr’s very bad books, you know.”

“So I heard. I was trying to ensure they behaved and didn’t scare you off. It backfired.” Bran kissed her again. “Please will you have me? Be my mate, my wife.”

Leah kissed him back, caught up in the moment, her mind racing. Then he paused, their foreheads pressed together, waiting for an answer.

She whispered, “Can we really go home tomorrow?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Then, I think, we should wait a little more.” His face fell and she pressed her mouth to his. “That’s not a no. It’s almost certainly a yes. But you said it yourself. It’s too soon. We haven’t been together very long. Today was the first time we even argued, Bran. This isn’t a small decision. It’s… for life. At least, I intend it to be. I want us both to know what we’re in for.”

Bran mulled it over. He brushed her nose with his. “All right. That’s… I can see your point. But may we compromise? Managing my wolf’s… rather forceful fondness for you will be easier if we are living together.”

She could understand that. Her wolf, _she_ , felt the same. “Can we split the time between my place and yours?”

“That’s fine. More than fine.” He smiled and she thought he was relieved. “I have very fond memories of your couch.”

Leah nodded. Firmly. This felt right. More than right. It felt good. Pressure she hadn’t realized she felt eased. “Then it’s a deal.”

“Agreed. Now, I would like to seal this deal in the traditional way,” he said, sitting up to pull off his T-shirt, the one she had been wearing for most of the day.

Leah laughed, wriggling out of her nightshirt. “Well, if you insist…”

\- end -

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative Titles:
> 
> "Oh - how the tables have turned"  
> "Leah goes up and down in elevators"  
> 


End file.
